Archive for Nate Straight

Suddenly a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

So one of BGG's incomparably talented graphic artists, Dennis Bennett, has released to the public his incredibly cool "Badger Deck" recently via PrinterStudio.

The full Badger deck is 10 suits with ranks running 0 to 20, plus A-K-Q-J, W-F [Wizard-Fool], and five more lettered ranks [Castle, Monster, Princess, etc].

The deck also includes special artwork on some of the 'special' cards [plus one additional card in that suit] in one suit that allow it to be easily used for Tichu in particular.

Suffice to say, you can play essentially any ranks-and-suits game ever devised [even many that require doubled ranks, so long as there are fewer than 10 numbered ranks, since the 11-20 ranks are helpfully designed to look like the standard ranks], and do so with an incredibly beautifully rendered deck in a cutesy fantasy / chibi style.

Providentially, until this Friday, PrinterStudio is running a site-wide 20% off + free shipping sale, which will allow you to get the entire deck [Dennis has released it in two parts: "0-11 with specials" and "12-20 add on"] for right around $26 USD shipped [don't know about international shipping]. That's a sickeningly good deal and you should take advantage of it.

The code for 20% off + free shipping is "20OFFSWIDE". I've been having trouble getting PrinterStudio to add both items to my cart simultaneously, so I had to check out twice, but you can use the code both times so it all works out the same. [Let me know if you find the trick to getting the cart to work, and I can update this blog post for others.]

Go and get this awesome deck before the code expires, tell your friends, and consider sending a bit of GG or $$ Dennis' way to thank him for this gift to the gaming community. There have been innumerable attempts to put together a "play any card game" style deck, but this is far and away the nicest looking and most well thought out effort I've seen.

Dennis did not compensate me in any way for this "promotion", nor did he request it.

For my regular readers who are depressed this isn't a "real" post: Look for an attempt at game-type classification by victory / scoring condition as well as a reader-requested post on systems theory and gaming in the months to come.

Suddenly a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Around the World in 80s Days

The year is 1980 and our hobby [at least on the continent I am writing from] consists largely of the sprawling wargames of SPI and Avalon Hill, the mostly abstract and parlor style bookshelf line from 3M, a healthy smattering of negotiation classics like Junta or Machiavelli or Dune or Cosmic Encounter, and the first big wave of fantasy titles such as Magic Realm or Titan or of course Dungeons & Dragons. A faint rumbling of a "chugga chugga" or a "wheeeesh" can be heard from such titles as Railway Rivals, Boxcars / Rail Baron, 1829, or even Dispatcher. It wouldn't be until later into the 80s with the reimplementation of Railway Rivals as Dampfross and development of 1829 into 1830 that these titles would really gain popularity and influence.

Beyond that, none of these early train-themed games bear much resemblance to what we think of today as a "train game" [not even the seminal 1829, although 1830 does; the difference, I think, is in the very restrictive way in which 1829 introduces both new companies and new track into play]. Railway Rivals / Dampfross is more akin to Streetcar: A connection game followed by a race game. Rail Baron / Boxcars is more akin to Merchant of Venus: A roll-and-move game of buying infrastructure and making deliveries; sounds about right, and MoV is this close to being a train game, but Rail Baron not only has pre-set tracks but limited delivery contract / route options. Dispatcher is a minutia-laden game more akin to the logistics in a wargame.

Chugga Chugga Choo Choo

So if all of those games aren't exactly "train games", what exactly is a "train game"? And why does anyone care? Similar questions are currently being fielded by Jason Begy in his dissertation on train games for Concordia University. I'm not going to attempt to go into nearly as much detail in my research as what Jason is likely to end up with, but I want to share a bit of the story of Empire Builder and its important place in hobby gaming. Along the way, I hope to place it as a transition point from these earliest train games to something recognizable as "the modern train game", and obviously to describe a fair bit of what that term means. So let's begin at the beginning: What is a train game? Well, we'll get to that later. First, let's answer something easier:

What is a train?

The train is one of the more revolutionary inventions in history, and was a critical part of the various industrial revolutions that took place throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Being able to produce widgets more effectively and efficiently [through the use of steam power, better machinery, increased understanding of materials and their properties, etc] is one thing, but to make widgets you need "stuff". You need lots of fuel to burn to power the machines. You need lots of raw materials to put into the machines. You need a way to transport the widgets to people who want to buy them. The efficiency of your economic engine is limited and defined by the amount of "stuff" you can move in and out, and the speed at which you can do it.

Trains had [have] a number of obvious advantages over other methods of moving "stuff" between producers, suppliers, and consumers: They were [for the time] faster than any other method of transport, and dramatically so [the Transcontinental Railroad in the US cut the travel time from the East to the West Coast from a matter of months down to 4-5 days]. They were [and still are] able to carry dramatically more payload than any other method of land transport. They require relatively little manpower and are relatively fuel efficient [especially when considering the tonnage of freight it is able to move]. Add it all up, and a train can carry more goods at distances further removed for a cost much lower than nearly any other mode of transport.

There is, of course, one piece of the equation which we are missing. Trains only run on track. Even though trains are fast and both fuel and cost efficient, train tracks are much less so. It took about 6-7 years to build the Transcontinental Railroad, and that was after decades of debate over where exactly it should go and who exactly should build it. The construction employed well into the tens of thousands of laborers. The total cost for the project was something around $100M in 1870 USD. That's just the main route. Every spur to stretch anywhere else in California but the Bay area, in the West but central Nevada and central Utah, and in the East but the Great Plains was yet another very expensive and time-consuming prospect.

This is the primary limitation on the effectiveness of trains. The infrastructure to support rail transport is expensive and slow to build, and increasingly so as it becomes less geographically centralized. For this reason, rail transport is most well suited to bulk transport between large centers of economic activity. Short runs and small loads are best left to other modes of transport. In the early history of rail transport [when UPS trucks and 18-wheelers were not a "thing"], much of this break-out traffic was handled by private local and regional railroads which connected smaller towns back to the major public transportation hubs. This was not generally very profitable, and inevitably these companies [and their track] were bought out by the larger railroads.

* A train moves "stuff" for the purpose of facilitating economic activity, and is an incredibly efficient and rapid means of economic transport.

* A railroad is an incredibly expensive and difficult bit of infrastructure, and is a limiting factor on the effectiveness of transport by train.

These, to me, are the defining elements of "trains" and the defining tensions involved in their deployment which a "train game" must capture.

There must be economic activity or growth which is furthered by the use of the trains or railroads in the game. There must be a tension between the "easy money" efficiency of running a train and the "hard labor" difficulty of building [or running] a railroad. There must be significant topological or geographic tradeoffs involved in the planning of rail connections or delivery routes. Niceties such as technological progression and industrial activity are welcome, but not essential. Side issues such as stock ownership and financial chicanery are an integral part of what "train game" means to many gamers, but this is mostly because these mechanisms in their full force just happen to have been applied to "train games" proper nearly to the exclusion of any other genre.

Industry stalwart Mayfair Games has been around much longer than has its signature title Catan. The company was founded in the early 80s for the purpose of publishing Empire Builder, an unassuming looking game co-designed by company founder Darwin Bromley [the other designer was Bill Fawcett]. Since then, the game has seen five revised editions, and over a dozen spin-offs in the "crayon rail" series. Its basic mechanisms for network expansion were copied directly in Funkenschlag [Power Grid's predecessor]. As a standard-bearer for network-building games in general and for Mayfair Games' entrepreneurial adventures as one of both the early "German game" importers and the early "train game" publishers, Empire Builder is a linchpin in the hobby.

If you have never played or researched Empire Builder, a brief overview is probably in order. The essence of the game is pretty simple: Take a natural resource map [with the cute little icons all over] for a country, overlay it with a hex grid made up of dots [the hex centers], then have players connect the dots [literally] with a grease pencil to indicate where they have built their tracks. The players use these tracks to run a train token back and forth between connected cities delivering various natural resources and industrial goods between their origin city and a randomly determined [through a contract card draw deck] destination, with payouts based on the distance between the cities involved. Repeat 'til someone has a sufficiently large network and sufficiently high cash assets.

This has a kind of intuitive common sense to it which I've written about before. The maps make sense. The kind of economic activity makes sense. The method of building track by drawing out the way you want to connect various cities makes sense. The means in which you make money by delivering goods from a fixed supply to a larger and variable set of demanders makes sense. Because of this, and best of all, even though it is simple it still feels like a real live red blooded train game [I'm looking at you, Ticket to Ride] and it captures the essential elements of the genre: Building track is expensive and takes a long time, but your train can zip back and forth across what track you've built pretty quickly; and there are real opportunity costs in how you plan both your network and deliveries.

The game also has one of the best early examples of what is now a pretty bog standard trope in train gaming [though 18xx largely eschews it]: Your income derived from economic activity during the game is for the large part of the game plowed right back into continuing the cycle of economic growth through more and more infrastructure [track]. It accomplishes this by forcing you to connect a certain number of larger cities, but more importantly by limiting how efficiently your wealth can grow if your network is not large enough to handle the vagaries of the random contract draw or to leverage the longer more valuable payouts. You simply will never reach the required total cash-on-hand victory condition without expending about as much [or more] cash over the course of the game to expand your network.

Like many modern economic engine games, there is a fairly well-defined tipping point when the focus of your game will shift from building the infrastructure / engine to churning out points with it. Along with Crude: The Oil Game, Outpost and Civilization, it's one of the earlier and more important examples of this basic game structure. Additionally, while it is not the first pickup and deliver game with players "carrying" goods on some kind of transport across the board to earn points [for one other easy example, see Alaska from a year earlier], it is definitely the earliest of any real impact and is pretty damn close to the archetype for that mechanism, what with movement points and carrying capacity and demand cards to fulfill. Merchant of Venus, Roads & Boats, Serenissima, and all of the other pu&d progenitors owe a large debt to Empire Builder.

More specifically, Empire Builder solidified a central element of pickup and deliver gameplay that has become part of the vast majority of games [especially train-themed games] which use the mechanism and which [importantly] is absent from all of the previous train-themed games mentioned in the intro: The idea that any given demand can be sourced from multiple supply locations, and [conversely] that any given supply can potentially be used to fulfill demands in multiple different locations. In prior games that had inklings of pu&d, delivery contracts were of the sort "go to that place, then come back to this other place". In Empire Builder, it is "Newcastle needs coal", but there are multiple places to get coal, and if you're not connected to any you'll have to decide which one works best with other potential deliveries.

That idea comes back in full force, of course, in Age of Steam and its family tree [parents and children]. While there are no trains which move around the board and demand is determined by the board topology itself and not a random contract draw, the essential tension remains of linking up a network various potential supply sources to various possible matching demands in such a way as to efficiently take advantage of as many as possible of the produced goods when they present themselves to be supplied to fulfill demands. If there is any other game series which is quintessentially the "modern train game", it is the AoS family, and while the supply/demand system is not a direct port in any sense, it is hard to imagine its having developed in the way it did without the earlier [possibly mediated] influence of Empire Builder.

I am less convinced / certain of it [i.e., would love counter-examples], but I am fairly sure that Empire Builder also represents one of the earliest instances of the concept [divorced from any physical pick-up-and-deliver action] of collecting a good[s] and using it to match up to a randomly drawn "contract" in order to gain a payout. This, of course, has developed through a little bit of mechanical accretion [turning in more than one good at a time in order to receive the payouts for the contracts in question] into a building block as basic to modern gaming as is worker placement or shifting turn order: set collection [esp. toward "contracts"]. Despite being abused and having become one of the most obviousdesignchoices when you need to convert "doing stuff" into points, it is a fundamental design tool.

Empire Builder paved the way for Mayfair to become one of the most successful hobby publishers ["publisher marks" at least, as it hasn't been continuously owned/operated as the self-same company]. Importantly for the topic of this post, it also cemented them as one of the foremost publishers of train games. In addition to all of the Empire Builder spin-offs, Mayfair was responsible for the importing from Hartland Trefoil of two of the earlier 18xx titles [1835 and 1853], for the sprawling economic epic that is Silverton, for two independently / in-house developed 18xx games [1856 and 1870], for a number of train-themed card games [Express, Freight Train, Station Master], and eventually [after a few corporate reorganizations] the functional [if not perfect] long-awaited reprint of the classic 1830: Railways & Robber Barons.

Add to that a number of Martin Wallace economic titles [Automobile, Aeroplanes, and of course Steam] and dozens of games licensed from KOSMOS [Catan, duh], and they are for all of their price-fixing and generally uninspired art and production direction a force for good in the hobby. In large part, no doubt, because of the head start which Empire Builder serendipitously gave them. What would Mayfair have been like without Empire Builder's success? What would your gaming life have been like without Mayfair's landing of Catan? They're not a Lookout Games [well, actually...] or an alea or a Hans im Glück that dominate the BGG hotness with new flashy releases every year from the most popular designers, but they remain a hobby standby seemingly in large part on the backs of tried and true designs like Empire Builder and Catan.

There's Room for Many a' More

I'll wrap up by trying to connect the breadcrumbs I've scattered throughout, primarily as it pertains to this thing I've called the "modern train game". It's a theme and a setting that seems to fascinate gamers regardless of their general gaming preferences. Titles like Rolling Freight, Snowdonia, Russian Railroads pop up every Essen and score high on the buzz lists / hotness tracker. Are these train games? Does it matter? Well, in all likelihood, no... but that would make this a waste of a blog post. I think it does matter that we define "train game" to mean something more than just "it has pictures of trains on the box", because there are implicit and conditioned things that are expected of something purporting to be a "train game". I'm going to toss in my two cents on what these are, without answering silly "Is ____ a train game?" questions.

Does a train game require a map? Surprisingly perhaps, I don't think so, but I do think it requires some kind of implied distance structure or other topology [which does not have to be geographical / physical; it could well be an abstract "network"]. I can imagine a free-form action-cost-as-distance game structure such as Container's being used in a game that is otherwise a train game. I can imagine some kind of "card adjacency" [not physical, but card-power / -value related] mechanism utilizing ranks and suits to denote distances traveled. And I can imagine a way to build an infrastructure that interacts with these systems without having "physical presence".

Does a train game require trains? Again, maybe a little less surprising, my answer is no. The basic concepts of very expensive or time-consuming infrastructure leading to very efficient growth all in the framework of a production / supply-and-demand economy are manifest clearly in actual trains and railroads, but also in various other settings. I consider the board play of Guatemala Café and Hacienda to be in many ways like (I wouldn't go so far as to say either is) a train game. Nearer to the Platonic ideal, Medieval Merchant and Power Grid seem very nearly to be train games. Then there's Samarkand which is also close. Merchant of Venus has at least one foot in the door.

Does a train game require network-building? Yes, or at the very least network modification [MoV's factories and spaceports, for instance, though again it's an edge-case example]. This is why at least some kind of distance structure or implied topology is necessary. Connectivity [and the building thereof] is central to what it means to have a "train" or a railroad. It is not merely a source of income [as in, say, Railroad Barons], but a source of mobility. That concept of mobility and connectedness and its impact on economic activity and growth is a sine qua non of train gaming, and a differentiating factor from mere economic engine games or mere financial simulations.

Does a train game require goods / pickup-and-deliver? No, although it does require some kind of implicit "from here to there" economic activity that is dependent on the connectivity just mentioned [for example, 18xx's counting of train routes which must pass through a station and then can "reach" to a number of connected cities of various economic value]. So, Martin Wallace's quip in the rulebook to First Train to Nuremberg that "with all good train games, there comes a time when you actually have to move things" is I think a little unfair [*wink*]. There are many ways to simulate economic activity and the "movement" of goods back and forth which do not require any movement.

Does a train game require stock-holding? No. Just no.

So, there you have it. For me, the modern train game is something at the intersection of network-building and economic-engine [to put it simply]. More than that, it is about the tension between hard-to-put-together and iteratively-expanded infrastructure [of uniform materials, so no combo-building super-power card-games here; rails and ties, there's your winning combo] and the rapid growth which it can facilitate. Because the infrastructure is expensive, it cannot reach everywhere in the game and significant opportunity-cost style decisions must be considered in the making of connections. The game pace needs to be long enough for the durability of the infrastructure to be felt [we are not merely blazing trails; a railroad is a permanent landscape fixture] and its use should be a large part of the game.

Suddenly a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

I actually will have something substantive to say about the project, but will withhold such commentary--to be updated here--until it ends, since the way the project's end is handled will likely greatly impact my impression of it. So far, I remain hopeful.

Suddenly a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Folks on BGG often ask questions like "What is the best Reiner Knizia game for me to get if I like auction games but want something thematic?" or "Is Through The Ages representative of Vlaada Chvátil's style? Could I like Galaxy Trucker even if I hated TTA?" or "What is it that makes Stefan Feld's games so wildly popular among Euro gamers?"

There is an implication, probably accurate, behind all of these questions that these and other designers have something uniquely theirs that distinguishes their work in much the same way that content creators are distinguished in other media: architecture, art, comics, dance, music, writing, whathaveyou. It is usually something obvious yet nameless.

We as gamers lack the type of robust classification and criticism system that other artistic media have [though we're making progress toward it], so it is difficult to explain what makes, for example, Knizia and Sackson and Colovini and Schacht's games similar, let alone what differentiates them from the Kramer / Breese / Dorra or the Georges / Feld / Dorn crowds.

I hope in this [two-part] post to catalog some of the more popular and stylistically consistent designers that I am familiar with and to try to give form to nebulous concepts such as "a Wallace game".

There will be two parts to each entry: 1) A 10-word or less description of the designer's style that highlights their most defining traits; 2) A longer narrative of the mechanisms they are known for.

I'll also try to reach outside of each individual designer's own catalog to identify some games that might be seen as influences on or extensions of their design style as I've identified and described it.

A man with a face any mother could love, Alan Moon designs games about:Teaching interesting life-lessons about decision-making... oh, and choo-choos.

Just barely edging out brass-knuckled Martin "Railways of the Industrial Age" Wallace, Alan Moon has the distinction of being the only designer whose topfourrankedgames are all the same game, and whose top ten ranked games actually consist of only five games. In fact, it is rumored that Alan Moon has only had one original game idea in his lifetime, and that that game is still being developed.

Alan Moon is also one of precious few designers [and here I'm actually being serious] whose work actually demonstrates any indication that he, you know, plays games instead of just thinks about them a lot. His games are for people who grew up enjoying games they weren't supposed to without knowing that they were breaking an unwritten geek code, for people who at one point kind of thought Rack-O was the pinnacle of strategy and secretly still think Monopoly "isn't that bad".

His games are interesting, yet easy to learn; intense, yet easy to play; interactive, yet easy to enjoy in a low-key manner. They're games you can play with your grandma and still [both] have fun and who the hell doesn't need more games like that? Among the two basic game ideas that Alan Moon has had in his lifetime [whoops, I underestimated] are competitive set-claiming and bizarrely difficult bidding... hey, that sounds kind of like a traditional card game! Yes, that is correct; every Alan Moon game is really Rummy, Bridge, or Poker in disguise [actually... that's not all not true].

For example:

In Ticket to Ride, the players draw cards into their hand, and then meld them when they have a seven of the same rank... no, wait... when they have five pink [purple? lilac? fuchsia?] trains. They then string these melds together [literally] in an attempt to get four concealed pungs... no, wait... a series of train routes that connect pairs of cities on cards they hold in secret. They then... no, wait... that's about it. Let's play! It is actually my contention that this isn't a Rummy game at all since the family is built on the draw-and-discard model of iteratively refining your hand toward a meld, and Ticket To Ride is just spam-drawing. Of course, that leaves me with concluding that Rummikub [and its public domain version, Vatican] are also not actually Rummy games, but I'm ok with that. Regardless, Ticket To Ride is almost as simple to learn and play as Rummy, and shares much of the same gameplay interest: Being efficient in your card draws / selections from the "discard pile"; satisficing with what you've drawn instead of holding out for "the big one"; trying to get that third Queen and discovering that the bastard across the table [i.e. grandpa] is holding the other two that you don't have. It's just fun.

In Das Amulett, the players signal and revise their intentions through a 2-level bidding system in which they compete for the right to name trum-... no wait, for the right to improve their hand [in the first level] and determine what resources will be won at auction [in the second level]. Ok, so this game is really nothing like Bridge, but it representative of a particular type of auction game that is distinctively Alan Moon's, being equal parts brinksmanship exercise and battleground, and that type of auction strikes me as being incredibly similar to the bidding mechanisms and card play found in traditional trick-taking card games, and particularly the more involved examples. Das Amulett, and others like Wongar or New England or Elfenwizards, are games of bidding not only for valuable lots of assets but for control over some aspect of the shape of the game or round or turn, whether it is preferential turn order, or control over what the next auction will be, or some other desirable status or privilege. Richard Breese also does a lot of design in this area in the "Key" series, but I would peg it still as a distinguishing feature of Alan Moon's bidding [and bluffing, see below] games, particularly those co-designed with Aaron Weissblum.

In Oasis and San Marco and quite a few others, the players make offers [in various forms] to each other, usually with an element of bluff concerning exactly what was offered or why. Both in making and in receiving these offers, there is a high degree of double-think that I find is also characteristic of traditional card gaming, and particularly of "beating" card games like Poker or Durak. In Oasis [following in the steps of Nicht die Bohne!, I suspect], players take it in turn to make an "offer" of resource cards; after the offers are made, each player in turn order will pick one of the other player's offers and receive their turn order button for next round. The players low in turn order will get sloppy seconds this turn, but hopefully will have offered enough to get priority of choice for the next. Oh yeah, they have to make these offers randomly. In San Marco, players have unique roles to play: One player serves as the divider / offerer, and one or two others serve as the chooser [yes, the same method choosy moms choose to let choosy kids choose peanut butter sandwich halves]. in splitting up the resources available each turn, the offerer must be reasonably equitable [or the chooser will leave her with nothing], but also conceal her desired lot [so it isn't taken out from under her].

And so on.

Another element common in Moon's designs [and appropriate to this perspective] is gambling or press-your-luck. In Ticket to Ride, as a basic example, you always have the option either of selecting a card whose identity / color you know [even if it's not ideal] or of picking random cards from the top of the deck and living with the potluck. Additionally, near the end game [or before], you have the choice to take a risk and plumb the depths of the destination ticket stack in hopes of something useful you already have connected.

In games like Diamant / Incan Gold, Clocktowers / Capitol, and Andromeda, the element of gambling is considerably more pronounced and overt. These games all share elements of "holding out" on closing off an open opportunity [or "putting in" for more shots at a probabilistic gain, alternatively] for as long as possible in hopes of getting a bigger and better return. His games ask you to make good choices and live with the consequences of poor ones.

Lest you think Alan Moon is all fun and games, he has quite a few relatively heavy games in his catalog, including a few wargames and some heavier train games [though by no means approaching the end of that genre's weight spectrum, or even the midpoint really], and a number of his games in the genres above [San Marco, in particular] can be quite thinky.

A man who opened arms and minds, Sid Sackson designed games about:Simplicity and strategic depth whenas rarely the twain did meet.

Though he did not have as many published games as Knizia, as consistent and prestigious a career as Kramer, or as prolific a ludological writing career as David Parlett, it seems near impossible to overestimate the significance of Sid Sackson's love for designing, analyzing, collecting, playing, and cataloging board games.

When Sackson's design career began around the 1960s, hobby gaming was chock full of monster wargames [led by Avalon Hill's early catalog] and near mindless family games [all of the ones we love to hate now: Life, Yahtzee, Battleship, Risk, Aggravation, etc were designed around this time, building on the legacy of Monopoly and Clue]. Sackson's designs were something different: Short, snappy, mathematically elegant, strategically demanding, focused on indirect player interaction, and structured in ways that kept everyone involved.

In short, there is good reason why he is largely considered the "original" Euro game designer. He had compatriots in this effort and design thrust, most notably including Robert Abbott and Alex Randolph. [Bruce Whitehill of www.thebiggamehunter.com has some very nice write-ups on both Sackson and Randolph that each discuss quite a bit about this early hobby game design community.] But, it was Sackson who would have the biggest impact through his incredibly diverse, yet stylistically consistent output. His games take minutes to learn but provide great depth and variety.

For example:

In Bazaar, there are exactly three things you can do on your turn: 1) Roll the die and get a gem of that color; 2) Make a trade of gems from either side of a set of 10 equations [randomly chosen each game from a larger pool of available trade equations] to receive whatever is on the other side; and 3) Turn in a set of gems that matches a card to claim it for points [you can always do this, whereas you either pick #1 or #2, but not both]. The fun of the game is that the goal is to eventually claim the set-collection goal cards with as few surplus gems as possible; this seems like it would not be possible when your options all consist of getting more gems, but [aha!] some of the trades let you trade down from a large assortment of cruddy gems to the 1 or 2 that you actually [hopefully] need. It sounds easy, but managing the 20 different directions of trades and figuring out how to piece them together to get exactly the set of gems you want and no others is incredibly difficult. The game isn't for everyone, as it's essentially one giant puzzle with interaction consisting of a race to claim as many goal cards as possible, but it's quite challenging and always presents something new.

In Monad, there are also essentially three things you can do on your turn: 1) Trade a set [pseudo-restricted] of 2 cards of the same value for 1 card of the next higher value; 2) Buy a card of any value by paying a set of other cards that sum up to its value; 3) Turn in a set of 4, 5, or 6 different colored cards of the lowest value and claim a higher valued card. You can do any of these as many times as you like and are able to on your turn. The goal is to start with just a few of the piddliest valued cards and maneuver so as to get a certain number of the highest valued cards. This is not easy, especially because of the restrictions to option #1 [which aren't really relevant in a summary overview] and the funkiness of the values / distributions. This is not quite as much a pure puzzler as Bazaar, as there is not only a race element but a setting-up-your-opponents element for interaction. When you trade in or pay out cards, you have to return them to a common supply, and this supply is incredibly limited; whenever you throw stuff back in, you're making it available for the next player. There's a lot of tempo control and maneuvering so as to keep good cards away from the opponents; some small rules for bonus moves and wild cards just make it that much harder.

In Acquire, there are also three possible things you can do on your turn: 1) Play a tile to the board from your hand [you must do this]; 2) Buy up to 3 shares of stock in the growing chains of tiles on the board [you may do this]; 3) If the tile you played merges 2 or more chains of tiles already on the board, decide what to do with your shares in those chains--this option also has three options: 1) Keep 'em, 2) Trade 'em 2 for 1, or 3) Sell 'em. The heart of the game is in trying to gain majority holdings in the stocks that you think will have the largest presence on the board at the end of the game; you get bonuses for having this majority, and also can get mid-game bonuses for majorities if you own shares in a smaller chain that is getting bought out by a bigger one. From these simple rules comes a multi-faceted game of positioning, pushing and shoving, and stealing from the work of other players. This game turned 50 years old last year, and at the time was still in the top-100 [it is #109 at the time of this post]. I personally consider it among the top 3 or 4 hobby games ever designed, for its elegance, replayability, depth, and interactivity. It is a perfect game if ever there was one.

And so on.

One of Sackson's wonderful abilities was to take the oldest and often stalest of gaming paraphrenalia and breathe new life into them, from Dominoes to Dice, from Checkers to Cards. In his [sadly now dated] A Gamut of Games, he shares quite novel designs of his own and other provenance for all of these, in addition to pen-and-pencil, poker chips, vocabulary, and very simple homemade components. It is my belief, and one I think is borne out in reality, that Sackson probably could have made an interesting game out of pretty nigh any components and any restrictions.

This is a skill not to be underestimated. There are precious few modern designers who show this foundational understanding of what a "game" is. Among them, I would place the likes of Reiner Knizia, David Parlett, and Wolfgang Kramer. You could empty your purse / wallet / pocket in front of one of these gentlemen, give them an hour or two to dig through all of the stuff, and very likely you could return and be playing a game with the detritus of your daily life that, if not particularly deep, was entertaining and provided meaningful choice to players.

Sackson shows the importance of a [mathematically] functioning game system behind whatever cute mechanisms or compelling story is tossed into the box with the rules. Call it dry, if you like, but for all of the games in the world of hobby gaming that are simply broken, uninteresting, too easy to do well at, but hide all of this behind a veneer of exciting chrome or fun twists on worker placement or action selection, there are some hundred plus Sackson games that need none of this to provide a compelling game experience.

More than any other designer [even Sackson], Michael Schacht is enamored with limiting player choice to a very small pool of options. One would be hard-pressed to quickly identify a Schacht title in which a player has more than, say, ten or twelve possible play options to choose from on their turn [including, in large part, trivialities such as "should I put this tile in location A, B, C, D, etc?"], and many have considerably fewer.

It is not that his games are simple or light; they are very often quite difficult to play well, in fact. For this reason, his games play very quickly and he is sort of a darling of the "under an hour, but with some depth" crowd. He gets a lot of play out of relatively few mechanisms by imposing fairly detailed limitations on and higher level interactions between them. He never provides a shortage of things to think about in considering your meager choices.

He also likes to toy around with shared spaces and/or resources to the point where the end result of one player's turn defines the starting game state that affects the next player's turn in a fundamental sense, and to a much greater extent than otherwise similar games where players merely bump heads or send out feelers. Players don't just "interact"; they flirt, touch, and dance. Much of it is coy, subtle, even unintended, but that's what makes it fun, of course.

For example:

In Hansa, the players share control of a single trading vessel sailing around Scandinavia and surrounding areas. Players are very limited in both the number of times they may move the ship [1 gold per, from a pool of around 6-8 in an average turn], and the direction in which it may go [routes on the board are all one-way]. The game consists of managing two interacting resources: trading posts and barrels. You can pick up barrels which you can later spend [as supplies] to build trading posts in a city; later still, you can spend those trading posts to sell off matched sets of barrels [for points]. You can only do one action per turn per city, so you have to setup a series of moves for future turns in order to really make any progress. Of course, the trouble is that you don't get to decide where those turns will begin; the player before you in turn order will simply say "hey, it's your turn" after they've finished moving the ship, and you have to pick up from that point. There are only so many ways to play out your turn, but each one has radical consequences for your opponent and for your flexibility in future rounds.

In Web of Power / China, the players build up networks of cities through regions on the board and compete simultaneously for political control of diplomatic pairings between regions. Turns follow the "3-2-1 rule": You can play up to 3 cards [your entire hand] to play 2 pieces in 1 region. This is a highly restrictive rule, and players have to conserve resources and manage their small hand very tightly in order to get the most leverage out of their limited options. The two resources [houses and ambassadors] are, of course, interconnected; the number of ambassadors that can be played in any given region depends on the number of houses that the current majority holder has there. This makes it very likely that by competing for majority control of the house scoring, you will open up your opponent for taking control of the political side of the region on the very next turn. Additionally, the first player to build into a region is only allowed to play 1 piece [a house] rather than the standard allotment of 2; of course this means the next player can easily add 2 houses in the newly opened region and immediately attain majority.

In Coloretto / Zooloretto / Aquaretto, the players [theme notwithstanding] attempt to collect a large number of 3 or 4 categories of items [from a pool of about twice as many] while collecting none at all of the remaining categories. A player's turn consists either of adding an item [randomly chosen, but freely assigned] to a standing offer [one per player, but shared publicly] or taking one of the offers and dropping out of the round. This iterates over a dozen or so rounds, and that's essentially the entirety of the game. The balancing act here is that players will of necessity be sharing wants, so when you try to fill up an offer just with stuff you want to get and nothing you want to avoid you will often be helping somebody else out as much as yourself [and they'll snatch all the goodies right out from under you]. There is also an element of cutting one's losses if a round of offers does not seem to be developing well. Zooloretto, Aquaretto, and a Coloretto variant add a restriction that within your chosen categories there is a limit on how much you can collect without penalty, so that feast and famine are bad.

And so on.

Schacht is also known for his mini-expansions and even mini-games that are available primarily on his publishing website, Spiele aus Timbuktu, but occasionally see publication by major publishers as promos or expansions. Because his games are so small, mechanically, they lend themselves well to variation and expansion. These aren't the kind of expansions that you collect and use all at once for "the full game" experience; they're more "variations on a theme".

A few other designers [including some on this list] handle expansions / variants similarly, but they often fall prey to the trap of simply making an entirely new game out of a minor change to a basic concept. Schacht has a few spin-off series [the --oretto series from above, also Valdora and Africana], but he usually tacks his new ideas and twists onto existing games in his catalog rather than developing them out as a new property.

This is nice, because there's less cost to the player interested in seeing where the designer has taken a favorite game. Schacht comes across, in fact, as one of the more "player-friendly" designers active in the hobby. He is generally active in all of his games' forums, and he regularly posts about new [free!] content for his more popular designs. If you are a print-and-play fan, you'll find much to love in Schacht's catalog.

A man, a myth, a legend, and a lifetime achiever, Klaus Teuber designs games about:Ramshackle settlements, family feuds, deserts, droughts, and pistols at dawn.

Klaus Teuber designed Catan. The single most-rated [>36000], most-owned [>45000] game in BGG's catalog. The game that for many represents the entire hobby of gaming. The nearly 20 year old game that really, when it gets right down to it, bears absolutely no resemblance to anything past or anything that has come since. The game that was a influential on the hobby as something like Magic: The Gathering or Dungeons & Dragons. It is, put simply, a pivotal game. And, it remains important.

Catan is so much of a phenomenon that people seem to forget that Teuber has done anything else [especially when so much of his future work has been tied, and understandably so, to the Catan license]. Yet, Teuber has also been successful in other gaming ventures. He has won 4 Spiel des Jahres awards, more than any designer side from Kramer. None of the other 3 SdJ titles [Catan is the 4th] from Teuber are even remotely related to Catan. Even the Catan-themed spin-offs of Candamir and Elasund and the "historical" titles are far removed.

Then, there are the games in the "Anno ____" series, based on the PC video game series, including large multi-player games and 2-player face-offs. And the games in the Entdecker series, including two spin-offs and two versions of the original. And the two version of Löwenherz. And a ton of other games that, mostly, have never been exported from Germany. Teuber is not a one-hit wonder by any stretch of the imagination. Still, a large number of his games share some of the same traits as are familiar from Settlers: Exploration, trade, negotiation, meager means, and competitive land parceling.

For example:

In Drunter und Drüber, one of Teuber's SdJ winning titles other than Catan, the players attempt to clear an otherwise functional town of everything except outhouses and one preferred type of building per player [which they are dealt secretly at the beginning of the game and keep secret until the endgame]. They do this by laying tiles progressively from each corner of the board, extending lines of river, rails, roads, etc until all of the relevant transportation departments [longshoremen, railmen, highwaymen?] have exercise all of the powers of eminent domain that they can muster. Whenever eminent domain would conflict with the town's love of outhouses, a vote is held; the players negotiate among themselves and vote on whether the construction is allowed to bulldoze through their precious latrines. Of course, you would want to vote against construction that starts to move toward your preferred buildings, but no one has the same preferences. Yes, it doesn't really make much sense at all, but in this game from way back in 1991, you can begin to see a lot of the features that would wind their way into Teuber's later, better designs.

In Löwenherz, one of those better designs, the players put to test the maxim that good fences make good neighbors. The game board is a nameless and modular medieval landscape peppered with mines, castles, hills, and forests. Players begin with castles also scattered across the board, and lay down knights stretching out from their castles to claim off land through force, and fences between squares of the board grid to claim land through more neighborly means. Of course, the problem with fences is that they're so easily knocked down! Once a plot of land has been completely walled off and claimed by a single player, they can extend out to weaker neighboring provinces using the power of their knights; though, if the neighbor has a stronger army in their territory, they can of course block this assault and instead return kindness for kindness. The game functions through a deck of three-part action-cards: Part A is a "collect money" [used to build knights] action; Part B is a "build knights" action; Part C is a "build fences" action. Only one player [from 4, ideally] each turn can do each action, and players declare intentions in turn. If two players want the same action, they have to negotiate with each other or, failing friendly resolution, "duel" in a simultaneous bid. Oh, and points are zero-sum after initial awarding: If someone takes over your territory, you lose the points and they get them! This is a very mean game.

In Elasund: The First City, one of the slightly-more-like-Catan-than-not spin-offs in the series [though still a good stone's throw away], the players build up [surprise!] Elasund, the first city of Catan! This is considerably more complicated a process, it turns out, than what the ancestral game would have you believe; no measly 3 ore and 2 wheat will suffice here. Instead, what happens is that players first lay claim to their preferred parcels of land, then put together enough resources and land claims to build one of the many buildings needed for the city, and eventually harvest additional resources and power from those buildings to develop things elsewhere. Oh yeah... and you can build your shit right over the top of someone else's building or land claim! All you have to do is have better shit than what they had! If you help build the church for the city, you have even more preferential claim to previously built land! Of course, the robber element from Settlers shows up here, and it's just as mean. This and Lowenherz are delightfully nasty games of intimidation and pulling the rug out from under each other.

And so on.

One of the frustrating things about many of Teuber's designs is the meanness of the game systems, however, and not the players... "mean" here in the sense of ungenerous and miserly, not mere nastiness. It is appropriate that his designs often have desert terrain, as dry spells and droughts are common occurrences. This is because his clever mechanisms of die-rolling and negotiation for meting out resources are fickle and subject to wild variation. It is quite possible to go many rounds without actively doing anything on your turn; this can turn some players off and is strange as a feature for the man who is considered to have veered gaming away from Monopoly, et al.

In fact, I would argue that Settlers has considerably more in common with Monopoly than it does not, and probably more in common with that maligned title than it has with most modern Euro games. Settlers is a snowball, rich-get-richer game. It is a game of total unfairness. It is a game of kingmaking and spite. It is remarkable that it ever caught on if what Euro gaming is about is keeping everyone involved, playing nice, and having fair outcomes not influnced by luck. Settlers is anything but that! And, I would argue, the best Euro games are anything but that.

Strangely, as I hinted at in the intro, Settlers has never really been copied in any meaningful sense. Certainly not in the sense that Caylus, Age of Steam, Puerto Rico, or any of the other "big" Euros have; even Carcassonne has been copied and ported more successfully. There are, to be sure, resource-collecting hex-map games like Keythedral and Roads & Boats or trading games like Bohnanza or Genoa, but the combination of mechanisms and interplayer dynamics that Catan offers is, still, quite unique.

A man among boys, Francis Tresham designs games about:Beating the snot out of each other in unconventional ways

Tresham is among a very elite cadre of designers like Sackson, Greenwood, or Teuber whose output and game-related activity has had radical and lasting impact on the shape of the entire hobby that stretches beyond the mere substance of their designs. Standing like two monstrous guardians on either side of a narrow strait through which one passes into a seemingly endless and ever expanding swell of train and civilization games are his category creating and inestimably influential 1829/1830 and Civilization.

1829 was the first serious and economically oriented railroad building game. 1829 was also probably the originator of all train games to follow wherein the routes and track on which trains run are built by the players rather than predefined or predrawn on the board [perhaps competing with Railway Rivals released a year earlier which would inform the crayon rail series and later become Dampfross, and aside from simplistic tile-laying connection games like Main Line or Rivers, Roads & Rails where "track-building" is itself the sole goal of the game and there is no board].

Civilization was among the first [if not the first; After the Holocaust and Empires of the Middle Ages are in contention] games to combine warfare with economic development, and almost certainly the first to do so under the now familiar theme of "beginning at the beginning" with a stone age [or worse] "civilization" and progressing it through the earliest stages of human development until [at least] the earliest inklings of modern political society that we find in classical antiquity. In Civilization is also embedded perhaps the earliest instance of the "economic engine"-building that would weave its way through Outpost into Puerto Rico and then explode.

Tresham's games are remarkable for their ingenuity, as well as their epic scope. Despite their length and high thematic immersion, Tresham's games [one exception noted later] are unlike the monster games of today that are nearly always full of luck at key decision points. The 18xx line that 1829 and 1830 birthed are perhaps the pinnacle of luckless, high-strategy economic games. While Civ technically has a mild element of the unknown in the assignment of calamity cards, their position in the deck is known at setup and theoretically fully trackable from beginning to end.

His recent game Revolution: The Dutch Revolt has a similar thematic underpinning as the more traditional wargame, Here I Stand, but does not share the same dice- or card-driven combat structure; instead, it has a luckless area control system. Only his almost completely unknown titles Shocks & Scares and Spanish Main have significant chance elements. Despite the lack of "dramatic" chance events, his games retain a sense of narrative and, more importantly and [perhaps to some] unexpectedly, a high level of direct player interaction.

For example:

In 1830, the players interact in two novel ways: By sharing ownership [and, so, both risk and return] of fledgling train companies, and by using the control [or abdication thereof] of those companies as a means of attacking or diminishing or otherwise inhibiting the financial position of their opponents. Although stock ownership mechanisms are nothing new [Acquire, for instance, predates the 18xx by a few decades], the particular type of stock ownership mechanism used in 1829 / 1830 is still woefully unfamiliar and underused. Players' stock portfolios are not merely investments [to be bought low and sold high], but are a means of effecting control of the organisms that operate on the game board. Players themselves do not perform actions on the boards; companies do. And only the player who owns the most shares in the company whose turn it is gets to say what that company does. [Among recent games other than the 18xx and certain other train games, only Imperial--to my knowledge--shares this structure.] Obviously, the player serving as president of a given company will do whatever is in her own [as a player] best interests, and not necessarily what is in the best interest of minority shareholders or even the corporation itself.

Besides acting as a means of control over the course of the game [and as an investment that can appreciate in value and often pay regular dividends], stocks are also a method of directly impacting another player's financial position. There are a couple of ways that this can happen, but the nastiest is to drain a company that you own of its productive assets [or simply allow them to go to waste], then sell off your entire controlling interest in the company [at currently super-inflated market value, of course] and pass off the hulking mass of inoperability to a minority shareholder in line for the presidency. In the most extreme of cases, that new president will be on the hook to salvage the company using personal assets, not be able to pay to do so, and go bankrupt [which ends the game]. Even in less extreme scenarios, the new president is left holding shares that are now worthless [your sale instantly corrected for the too-high valuation in the open-market]. The game is a dance, then, between wanting to share in the benefits of buying in to the most profitable companies and needing to avoid this type of liability as a minority shareholder if the president suddenly decides personal gain is more important than corporate performance. Few games pit player incentives and liabilities against each other in as direct a way.

In Civilization, the players largely get on fairly peaceably; the game even [like a modern area majority game] allows units from multiple players to live in the same territory simultaneously... to a point. Beyond that threshold, combat takes place in what is among the simplest and most direct combat resolution systems in all of gaming: the player with fewer units removes one first, then the player with more units removes one, then the player with fewer, and so on until the number of units in the territory is again below the threshold [I guess they just forget they had been fighting after that, since they immediately go back to peaceable relations]. Combat is not the focus of the game, obviously, but is instead a means to an end. Trading and development is the focus of the game. Units eventually transform into cities; for every city, players gain increasingly more valuable resources; using those resources, players trade [a la Pit or Catan] and then purchase technological developments [worth VP toward winning the game]. Besides combat and trading, the most inventive method of interaction here are calamity cards "hiding" [at preset positions] in each deck of resource cards. If you draw a calamity card, you can attempt to offload it in a trade [claiming or implying it to be something else]; if you're stuck holding it at the end of the trading round, you suffer the consequences.

As in the 18xx, the goal of negative direct interaction is to assail an opponent's economic position and opportunity; this takes place in Civ through combat or trading of calamities, and the effect is to reduce the collection of resources by an opponent. Part of the turn cycle are two versions of a now familiar "feed your population" type of mechanism; in the first, a player must have unit tokens in their supply equal to twice the number of cities they have on the board; in the second, a player must have two units on the board for every city. If either condition is not met at the appropriate time, the player will lose cities and the ability to draw the most valuable resources. This is a difficult enough balancing act to deal with in isolation; it is made increasingly more difficult by well-timed combat or well-traded calamities. Knocking off a few opposing units through combat could be enough to eliminate one of your opponent's cities, denying their ability to draw a much needed resource to complete a valuable set. Destroying a dozen by calamity can be devastating. While the game's basic flow is a typical "build up your infrastructure and then leverage it for victory points" chain of collecting, trading, and spending resources, the very high marginal cost of infrastructure coupled with its fragility makes the game quite dramatic.

In Revolution, the players take the role of 1 of 5 different competing interest groups [religious or political factions] involved in the economic, political, and religious struggle in the late 16th and early 17th centuries for the area that is now the Netherlands. As in the similarly [but more grandly] themed Here I Stand, these factions have nearly completely asymmetric goals and resources. The game is an area majority game writ large. The essence of the game is quite similar to Civilization's combat mechanism, where the reaching of a threshold of population in a region triggers a removal of units one by one, starting with the weakest faction, until the threshold is once more unmet. Where it differs from Civ is in having a much more detailed system for extorting controlled territories, creating new units, moving existing units, messing around with other players' units, and employing alternative methods of assaulting an opponent's control of a region. The uniquely novel twist here is that each faction in the game has comparatively more or less control over the ability to use any of the multitude of ways of influencing a region or city. Some factions get cheaper armies; some get more armies; some can hire mercenaries; some have objectives that are easier to defend; some harder; etc.

And so on.

Besides the general "epic" scope of his games and the emphasis on luckless direct interaction, the overarching mechanical theme of Tresham's work is the trade-off between active and potential assets, and in particular on the transformation between the two states. In all of the above games, your economic resources exist in "raw" form or embedded in some productive asset. The basic resource is "money" in each game. The productive assets in 18xx are shares and trains; in Civ the assets are units and cities; in Revolution the assets are military units and various other influence.

The quirk that is uniquely Tresham's is the rate and frequency at which assets cycle back and forth between these two states. In 18xx, the game progresses through "stock rounds" in which money is converted into shares [later in the game, vice-versa] and "operating rounds" in which shares pay out dividends and money that was paid for shares is converted into trains [which drive dividend payouts] in an endless cycle. In Civ, every round has phases in which reserve assets are transformed into spendable cash and to units on the board, then from units on the board into cities [which, in turn, increase both the resource productivity of the civilization and the rate at which reserve assets become cash].

In both games, productive assets often get liquidated back to their raw form. In 18xx, trains can be sold between companies to move large sums of cash around, and shares are often dumped at opportune times to net the appreciated gains. In Civ, cities may dissolve and be transformed back into units, and units may be liquidated to construct ships or cities or resolve events. Also of note is the "holding company" status of intermediary assets: train companies own and spend cash paid for shares in 18xx, and armies of units eventually "upconvert" embedded reserve assets into cities in Civ.

A man who loves your misery, Martin Wallace designs games about:Keeping your investments from being derailed at every unexpected turn.

Martin Wallace is a big meanie, but not the overtly bullying sort. No no no; instead he butters you up first with the promise of great prosperity like some ARM-hawking mortgage broker who forgot his morning coffee, then ratchets up the required monthly payments until you're underwater, underleveraged, and under a lot of pressure from brass of all sorts to get your act turned around [nevermind that your demise wasn't even your fault].

The mechanism he is best known for is, appropriately, the taking of loans [which very often literally cannot be repaid]. To remind you of your inevitable financial distress, the tokens representing loans are often a friendly pitch black color or else penciled in bright cheery red. They are also given neighborly euphemisms like "poverty", "trouble", or the joyfully abstract "loss"; but no, they're all still debt... dirty, stinking, irreconcilable black holes of sucking debt. That slurping sound was all your liquid assets being drained dry. Martin Wallace drinks your milkshake.

It isn't just that the economies in Wallace's games have thin margins and are prone to predictive errors that necessitate short-term solutions in the form of a high interest payday loan. No no no; once again Wallace is not so kind. Instead, his games place you in the role of an upstart "idea person" in need of venture to realize [you foolishly hope] your dreams. It is not uncommon to have to begin a Wallace with literally no operating capital or assets, and the need to immediately go into debt in order to get off the ground. Of course, you will take on more of it later, often every other turn [if not every turn outright]. The "debt" systems he deploys are often quite nuanced and implemented in unexpected ways.

For example:

In Age of Steam, the players manage train corporations from initial venture funding to sprawling rail empire. The would-be Railroad Tycoons have no company assets and no cash... just the promise of profitable return. Players must begin the game by immediately extending a certain number of "shares" [to nameless investors not appearing in this film] for which they receive $5 each... and must pay $1 each in interest at the end of every round for the remainder of the game. The principal amount is never repaid by your company [these are shares, mind you, not bonds or loans], but the indebtedness is inescapable [you can never reduce your share issuance] and if you cannot pay interest out of a current round's revenue stream or your company coffers [retained earnings], your future income will be garnished. You can easily go bankrupt in the first few rounds through poor planning. The system requires a tight balance between cash inflows and outflows, that involves planning out revenues and cash needs in advance while servicing the minimum amount of debt necessary to fuel that economic engine.

The subtlety of the game, however, lies in the interaction of this system with the victory conditions; victory in the game is assessed [as it is in large part for most real-world business valuations] as discounted future earnings, where the estimate of future earnings potential is equal to the income of your economic engine in the final round of the game and the discounting factor is a $1 reduction in that income estimate for every share issued. There is a wealth of opportunity available in the game for near unbridled growth, in absolute terms, of your empire; the problem is that if you take out enough debt to fund all of that opportunity right away, the net effect will be a loss in the short-term and severe devaluation at the game's end. You need some absolute growth, but what you really need is a better rate of marginal growth in revenue vis-a-vis your growth in interest expense than that which your opponents can manage. It's a struggle to figure out how to put together long routes [which are more profitable] without simply bonding out all of the cash to pay for them up front; you also need to finance the incredibly important turn order auction.

In London, the players manage the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire, and continue to develop their part of the city on into the 20th century. It is a tableau-building game like Race for the Galaxy, Through the Ages, or 51st State. The key feature distinguishing it from these games is the need to intentionally limit the rate of growth of your tableau beyond the systematic / game-imposed limits set by your rate of resource collection and production capacity. As you lay down cards in your tableau and then activate them, you will receive a "poverty point" [i.e. foreboding black cube] for every card you have played; however, since most cards "flip over" after their initial activation, you are allowed to limit the growth of your poverty level as you lay down new cards by "stacking" them on top of previously-played cards [flipped or not]... poverty is technically collected, then, per stack rather than per card played [it's helpful for this post to think it through backwards like this; it's presented in the rules directly as one poverty point per stack, of course]. You would, of course, like to have a huge array of cards to activate all at once, but that will net you a ton of poverty, so you stack.

Poverty itself isn't an absolute evil; you can theoretically have as much of it as you like and still win the game. At the end of the game, what will happen is that each player will discard an equal number of poverty points [equal to the total that the least poor player has] and then be penalized for any amount remaining above this level; that is, for their relative poverty level as compared to their opponents' burroughs of the city. Oh yeah, we should talk about those burroughs; the chief way to manage poverty is by buying up portions of the city [to house the poor, I guess]. This is essentially a "VP grab" / "resource grab" option; you get to draw some cards and collect some VPs by paying some money. The long-term benefit is that every burrough you own in the city reduces your poverty allocation by one point every time you activate your tableau of cards. [A secondary way to manage poverty is through a number of cards that simply remove some of your amasses poverty points.] Oh, there are of course "normal" loans in the game, too, where you simply get a loan counter, an amount of money, and then pay interest every turn until you repay the principal.

In Automobile, the players build, market, and [hope to] sell automobiles. The game is one of staying ahead of a technological arms race to have the newest, shiniest cars and of accurately guessing at the demand for cars, old and new. You are penalized, in the form of "loss cubes", for not keeping pace with progress and for being over-anxious with both production and marketing. "Loss", here, is much less like debt than "poverty" is in London, since there isn't any immediate gain associated with it [in fact, you've just wasted a lot of effort at producing all the stuff you had to sell at a loss]. Rather, "loss" is the price of standing still, a luxury you can only afford if you are saving up resources for a critical moment. It costs money [and actions], after all, to innovate or to get preferential space on the sales floor. If you don't have money or actions to press ahead, you can hope to scrape by on what assets you already have, and the potential for accruing "loss" is the "debt" you take on for buying that extra time. If you choose to innovate, you'll probably be taking the more typical monetary loans that, as in London, are also available.

And so on.

These historically-themed, debt-driven, conflict- and confrontation-heavy economic Euro games are probably what Wallace is best known for [the keen reader will notice I left out Brass, which has its own cute little loan system reminiscent of Age of Steam]. He also has a penchant for historical conflicts of a non-economic nature, including Struggle of Empires, Byzantium, Liberté, and many others [his catalog consists of about a 50-50 split between economic and military history / empire-building games, if not slightly military-leaning]. His militaristic games don't have "debt" as such [certainly nothing much like any of the systems above]; they do, however, have concepts like "resource committal", "guns or butter", and "action economies".

In Bzyantium, for example, players simultaneously play a worker-placement cube-pusher [cubes are workers and resources] and an area-control world-domination game [where cubes serve as armies and movement / hit points]. The commitment of scarce resources [cubes, from a single supply per player] to either the action draft or the army development side of the game precludes and limits commitment to the other. The actions available for drafting are related to board control and economic efficiency; taking armies directly cannibalizes economic efficiency, as heavy military upkeep costs are imposed on the player that rise with the size of their army.

His military games also toy with the idea of playing multiple sides at once. In Byzantium, you play for both the Arabs and the Byzantine Emperor, and your score is essentially the sum of the two. Liberte has a system apparently much like König von Siam, where you progressively put political "stock" into the faction you hope will win, and then try to maneuver so as to achieve that victory for your favorite. Perikles has a funky area majority game driving control of either side in a number of different conflicts that players will resolve in a separate phase; and you can switch sides next round! And so on.

Men who look too friendly to rip your heart, soul, and brain out, but do anyway,Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga [aka Splotter] design games about:Managing long-term supply-chains, or at least pretending to.

Around 1999, Splotter launched with an initial catalogue of about 6 or 7 games, championed by Bus and Roads & Boats. Together, these two games heavily influenced, or nearly created, the genre we now recognize as the resource management Euro game. Bus, with Keydom, is among the earliest games to make explicit use of the exclusive action-drafting mechanism we now know as "worker placement". Roads & Boats is perhaps the earliest example of a "resource conversion" Euro [i.e. cube-churner]. These are the two halves that together created Caylus [by conscious design choice on William Attia's part or not].

Later Splotter designs like Antiquity directly influenced the creation of the other huge worker placement resource game, Agricola, as described by Uwe Rosenberg in his "advent calendar" design diary. And the dynamic design duo of Jeroen and Joris hasn't stopped innovating and creating exciting games, with the brilliantly nasty Indonesia following Antiquity by a year, and the Merchant of Venus reboot Duck Dealer and satirical [and timely] Greed Incorporated following shortly after. The Splotter team have left behind the smaller titles that spotted their catalogue early in their history, and this has been a really good thing for the heavy game market.

Splotter games are about very long-term planning all mixed up with short-term efficiency. They are almost always entirely or very very nearly luckless, and are chock full of logistical planning nightmare puzzles to burn even the brainiest of brains. Splotter games are the Lexus of heavy Euro gaming: exceptional attention to quality in the design, and focused on "the relentless pursuit of perfection" in play. "Relentless" is, in fact, exactly the word to describe the demands are on your ability to plan multiple turns into the future. Making this task more difficult is the fact that even getting through one turn unscathed requires a lot of mental energy. Yet, if you're just living turn by turn, you're losing the game.

For example:

In Roads & Boats, the players are tasked with transforming 5 sticks, 3 donkeys, 2 geese, and 1 pile of rocks into as much valuable corporate stock as possible. Obviously, the path by which such a magical transformation may be accomplished must be a long and winding one, and that's where the roads and boats come in. By picking up the sticks and stones with your donkeys and moving them somewhere where you can build a quarry or a woodcutter, you can get a few more sticks and stones, then eventually build a mine to get some gold, then a mint to make some coins, then a stock exchange to write promissory documents against the gold coins... oh yeah, but you'll need some fuel along the way. Suffice to say, there are a lot of conversions that must take place. Trouble is, once you get past the first few "setting up" turns, you will have resources piling up and needing to be fed into every individual process in that long, winding production chain. At any given time, you might have raw lumber waiting to be made into building materials and gold coins waiting to be written into stock, plus everything in between. Ideally, every single turn would be an assembly line of simply moving progressively more inputs through a just-in-time production system so that money just comes pouring out the end; of course, this doesn't happen. What happens instead is that you marvel at your own inefficiencies and are lucky if you manage to scrape up two coins to rub together by the end of the game.

In Indonesia, the players acquire shipping companies and goods-producing companies that serve to distribute the staples of life [including microwave TV dinners] to the islands of the titular country. Challenge #1 is that only so many goods can be delivered per turn [each city only needs one of each good at first, unlike say Age of Steam whose otherwise similar goods-movement mechanism can service each city multiple times per round with the same type of good], so turn order and preferential access to routes is a key issue to manage in your long-term strategy. Challenge #2 is that companies may be merged; oh, by the way, "may be merged" means "by anyone", so that great shipping company you control could get merged with some lousy upstart, and a completely uninvolved third player could bid up and buy the ownership rights to the new larger, better, more profitable shipping conglomerate! So much for preferential access! The game builds step-wise as more and more cities have their demands fully satisfied, until eventually all of the cities on the map are accepting multiple shipments per turn and the players who have managed to position themselves and their asset holdings to take advantage of this economic development will find themselves rolling in revenue while players who planned less effectively will be left eating ramen noodles instead of the deliciously exotic sounding "siap faji" [those microwave meals]. From the outset, you have to make a plan to manage your liquidity and financial vulnerability.

In Antiquity, the players experience what it was really like to be a subsistence farmer in the Middle Ages; this game makes Agricola look like a cakewalk. There are steps each round for the assignment of famine, pollution, and graves. If you were lucky enough to have playtested the game, you are forever immortalized with your name on these gravestones! These and the pollution counters are the pivotal components / "resources" in the game, yet managing them is only a secondary concern. The primary concern is racing as fast as possible to one of 5 different victory conditions. It doesn't matter how much plague and pestilence you have going, if you manage to put one of these conditions together, you win. Of course, it is incredibly difficult to marshall the resources needed to do so without keeping death, disease, and decay at bay. The game itself is a combination of a territory-claiming, resource-gathering hex-map game like Settlers or any decent civ game and a special-power, city-building grid-filling game like Puerto Rico or any decent economic engine game. It is, essentially, an economic civilization 4x game writ [very] large. As in Roads & Boats, players start with almost nothing and must manage to grow that nothing as quickly as possible into increasingly more valuable assets; unlike R&B, there are not only player-centered inefficiencies to deal with, but game-driven obstacles to your growth. It is an intensely difficult and compelling game.

And so on.

Splotter games are not for the faint of heart. They are usually quite long, involved, and difficult to play well. However, the player is rewarded for their effort with games that stretch the limits of the Euro genre and push it in directions not yet taken, games that present new and interesting challenges worthy of analysis, and games that are [usually] brutally interactive.

Among modern designers, very few are as ambitious as Jeroen and Joris. They are designers as stouthearted as are the players they design for. For this reason, they don't have nearly the breadth of output as most of the other designers in this series [as I recall, only Tresham has fewer designs], but their depth is nearly without peer.

So, despite the price tag and wargame-like components, I think gamers would do well to pluck up their courage and give a good old-fashioned college try to these truly interesting creations. There's really very little out there that is at all comparable in epic scope and need for end-to-end analysis.

Games that share traits with the Splotter duo's designs include the 18xx, Neuland, Kaivai, and the games of Phil Eklund [though quite obliquely].

Suddenly a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Folks on BGG often ask questions like "What is the best Reiner Knizia game for me to get if I like auction games but want something thematic?" or "Is Through The Ages representative of Vlaada Chvátil's style? Could I like Galaxy Trucker even if I hated TTA?" or "What is it that makes Stefan Feld's games so wildly popular among Euro gamers?"

There is an implication, probably accurate, behind all of these questions that these and other designers have something uniquely theirs that distinguishes their work in much the same way that content creators are distinguished in other media: architecture, art, comics, dance, music, writing, whathaveyou. It is usually something obvious yet nameless.

We as gamers lack the type of robust classification and criticism system that other artistic media have [though we're making progress toward it], so it is difficult to explain what makes, for example, Knizia and Sackson and Colovini and Schacht's games similar, let alone what differentiates them from the Kramer / Breese / Friese or the Georges / Feld / Dorn crowds.

I hope in this [two-part] post to catalog some of the more popular and stylistically consistent designers that I am familiar with and to try to give form to nebulous concepts such as "a Wallace game".

There will be two parts to each entry: 1) A 10-word or less description of the designer's style that highlights their most defining traits; 2) A longer narrative of the mechanisms they are known for.

I'll also try to reach outside of each individual designer's own catalog to identify some games that might be seen as influences on or extensions of their design style as I've identified and described it.

The common thread through nearly every one of his designs is an emphasis on progressively creating an infrastructure that can respond flexibly to leverage continually unfolding information and opportunities, and can eventually withstand a procedural "check" phase that awards or takes away points for the quality of preparation.

Criteria on which the player's infrastructure will be judged or opportunities which the player will be asked to take advantage of are nearly always occluded behind hidden or uncertain information. Usually, the player is given a way to "peek" at bits and pieces of this information, and possibly to control or modify it, usually over the course of many turns.

For example:

In Dungeon Lords, the players construct nefarious weblike dungeons and fill them with traps and monsters in hopes of knocking out the would-be do-gooders who will come galumphing through each player's dungeon in search of some manxome foe to slay. Different classes of adventurers require different preparation, and players will be assigned 3 adventures each over the span of 4 preparatory rounds before the "combat" check phase occurs. The pool of potential adventurer assignments is revealed iteratively turn-by-turn, as are the monsters and cavernous rooms that can be used to build up a Rube Goldberg Machine of Death to stop the good guys. Part of the preparation involves maneuvering so as to be assigned the adventurers your dungeon is best suited for, and largely the player who succeeds most at this maneuvering will win. After the unwelcome mats are laid out and the adventuring parties are knocking at the front door, a largely deterministic and highly procedural phase of "combat" ensues to see who can handle the outgrabeous onslaught and who will be snicker-snacked.

In Galaxy Trucker, the players assemble amassments of surplus space scrap in overoptimistic pursuit of something bearing vague semblance to a spaceship. Different bits of scrap allow players to perform different actions and use different resources, from lasers for shooting down baddies to cargo holds for transporting tribbles and other biohazards to shields for avoiding the inevitable meteor swarm [you'd think they'd just drive around, right?]. Oh yeah, they do this in real-time, too. After a mad-cap tile-laying ship-building sub-game, a series of cards are flipped over in sequence to determine the parameters of and obstacles encountered on the "flight". Those players who were not well-prepared will fare poorly; those who were better prepared will fare... well, less poorly at least. After the first few learning games in which players figure out how to perform the complex task of lining up matched sets of 0-, 1-, 2-, or 3-pipe connectors between their ship parts, they will have the opportunity to take a [real-time] peek at most of the "flight" cards before finishing their ship preparation.

In Space Alert, the players will commiserate over the failure to cooperate in the attempt to protect a hopelessly doomed space craft with a hopelessly incompetent crew and hopelessly poor engineering from being blown to smithereens by dangerous and very dangerous alien hostiles. Unlike most cooperative games where planning and action happen simultaneously, this game is played out as a real-time 10-minute planning phase followed by a procedural "acting out" of what was planned. During the real-time blindfolded elephant description phase planning phase, alien threats and system breakdowns will gradually be revealed to the players by the most obnoxious voice-over CD ever recorded. As this new information is made known, players will use increasingly many expletives refine their plans so as to make it look like they know what the hell is going on minimize the amount of damage taken. They do this by pre-programming three entire rounds of RoboRally at the same time. A procedural action round then tells them how many years the Federation will banish them to Rura Penthe for.

And so on.

Through The Ages and Mage Knight have a similar structure, only the "check" phases are both more frequent and less severe. They take the form of civilization upkeep and production in TTA, and of smaller monster combat or native interaction rounds in Mage Knight. The focus in these bigger games is on the information and opportunity inflows, which also come more frequently.

Vlaada has a few other stock mechanisms, too, with the most obvious being the stepped progression of two or three game phases, each involving more complicated actions or resources and more involved planning or "check" phases. Every game mentioned above features this. Dungeon Lords has two "years", with tougher adventurers in the second; Galaxy Trucker has three phases, with bigger ships to build in each; Through The Ages puts the players through three, well, ages.

He also reuses a type of "player ranking" mechanism throughout nearly all of the above, where players move back and forth along one or more tracks representing the current status of their infrastructure along some axis of interest, and are occasionally judged or rewarded [outside of the main "check" phase] for their position. Dungeon Lords has the "Evil-o-Meter"; Galaxy Trucker has the racetrack; Through The Ages has the Culture and Military tracks; Mage Knight has Fame and Reputation. This is commonly the primary source of interaction in his games.

Decision-making in a Vlaada design typically involves prioritizing between the actions and resources needed to address each part of the "check" phase, as informed by the progressive revelation of what it will consist of, or simply prioritizing between flexibility / adaptability and amassing enough infrastructure in a single area to reap a large payoff if you get the opportunity. There are always at least half a dozen concerns to balance in decision-making, with different payoffs for each.

In spite of the multifaceted complexity of his designs, they do not fall prey to the "18 kinds of resource chits to transform back and forth" or "there are 5 resources which are mostly identical except for color" trap that plagues big Euro designs like Le Havre, Puerto Rico, Goa, or Macao. Vlaada's games typically have only 2 or 3 primary resources that do wildly different things.

A man with a game about donkey poop, Rüdiger Dorn also designs games about:Ducks, rows, trails, breadcrumbs, influence peddling, interplayer meddling... and poop.

Rüdiger Dorn is a "classic" German game designer. His themes involve trading in the Mediterranean, building castles or palaces, wielding influence in political courts, and doing things with dragons other than slaying them. His games involve trading, auctions, tile-laying, set-collection, technological development, and action / resource management. To quote a recent review: "If that doesn't get your blood pumping, you're. . . well, every gamer I've ever sat at a table with."

It's true, Dorn's game are not glitzy. They are, however, part of the pre-Rosenberg style of Euro game, built on positive player interaction, mutual gains and goals, shared spaces, and dynamic incentives. One of the defining features of a Dorn game is that players gradually unveil and declare their intentions or interpretations of game state to each other by relatively small actions which join together to form a larger picture. Sequencing of small actions and relative positioning in shared spaces are the order of the day. Often, this dynamic involves laying down claim markers in that shared space in physical patterns that define certain actions or effects to be activated or offered, in what is sometimes referred to as Dorn's "leave a trail" mechanism.

At times, there is only one trail which belongs simultaneously to all players [Goa, Genoa]. At other times, there are multiple trails which are available to all players [Titania, Arkadia]. At yet other times, each player has their own "trail" [Louis XIV, Robber Knights, Il Vecchio]. These "trails" often grow one space at a time into a series of adjacent cells, which is reminiscent of Mancala; Dorn has, of course, a few games with variously direct nods to that classic [Emerald, Space Walk, Der Schatz der Erdgeister]. Whatever the incarnation, the mechanism typically involves ensuring that your strategic direction is aligned with the likely path the game will take, and has all the components in place so as to take advantage of any unexpected twists or detours from that path. Additionally, you must take care to maneuver yourself around the intended directions that your opponents gradually reveal to you.

For example:

In Genoa, one player per round controls the "tower", a stack of 5 action discs which leave a trail across the board, potentially activating any of a wide number of different action and resource collection spaces in the form of buildings in the port city of Genoa. The catch is that while there are 5 discs, each player is only allowed to take a single action per turn [and usually 3-4 actions, or even 5, will be available based on the direction the tower takes]. Every time the tower steps into a new space [leaving a disc behind as part of the growing breadcrumb trail], the tower player may negotiate with all the other players for the right to take the action; this usually ends with another player paying the tower player some amount of money and goods and getting the right to use that space as their one action for the turn. The tower player can also negotiate for the tower's next move [this is, in fact, the more common approach; there are rules that harm the tower player if she just moves the tower willy-nilly without taking offers first]. Of course, the tower player can just take her single action for the turn and then stop moving, but then she misses out on all the potential bribe money.

The goal of the game is essentially set-collection, either of resource cubes [in 8 varieties] to fulfill "orders" cards or of adjacent ownership of "privilege" cards associated with each building on the board. These cards and resources are picked up from various spaces on the board [along with a few other layers of possible things to collect and do], and the most valuable ones require you to collect resources from 3 corners of the board and deposit them in the 4th. This obviously cannot be done in a single turn, so the key to doing well in the game is to manage multiple set collection goals simultaneously and flexibly negotiate for something of value on every turn, wherever the tower ends up trailing off to. While you are in control of the tower, it is often to your advantage to choose a path that is less directly beneficial to yourself so as to move toward areas of the board that you think your opponents will pay you a premium for access to. Of course, if you can manage to align your preferred direction of movement with your opponents' preferences, you'll do even better. It's also possible for players to lay claim to buildings along the trail and earn commission fees for their use later.

In Goa, as in Genoa, a grid of available actions or resources is displayed in the center of the table, and players attempt to gain access to their preferred items from that offering. The mechanism here, however, is auction-based rather than negotiation-driven; additionally, the resources / actions on the board are removed from play [into a player's personal area] each round instead of remaining to be used on a later turn. The selection mechanism consists of each player taking it in turn to place a auction marker [of 5 total--surprise, surprise--in the full 4p game] adjacent to the marker the player before them placed, leaving a trail of to-be-auctioned items across the board. These are then auctioned off in sequence, with the player who placed the auction marker on each item serving as auctioneer [and receiving the bid money if they do not personally win the auction]. There is a great deal of gamesmanship in [as starting player] choosing where to begin the auction and [as any other player] where to continue the auction trail so as to ensure that the items you are most interested in come up for bid in the order you want them to. As items get removed from the grid, this element becomes even more important, since choices for adjacent items to claim for auction become more and more limited.

In Diamonds Club, players buy remarkably silly and ostentatious things to put in their equally silly and ostentatious palace gardens. Additionally, there's a fun little twist on the action-availability-altering nature of the "leave a trail" mechanism as it's found in Genoa or Goa. There is a public grid of available resources, as in either of the two other games, but players do not "trail" across them in making their selections; nevertheless, the selections depend on adjacency, except the mechanism disfavors selections that are adjacent to each other [maybe "playing hopscotch" instead of "leaving a trail" is more appropos]. To claim an item from the grid on your turn, you put a coin on it; the catch is that you also must put an additional coin on the item for every coin in a square adjacent to it [i.e. on every previously claimed item]. The progression of claims is kind of like watching a losing Bingo card fill up: Spaces get blotted out that are completely separated from each other [often in checkerboard fashion], and then only near the end of the round do players decide they need to pay a bit more to make some claims adjacent to previous selections. The remainder of the game is a bit of a mix of Genoa's set-collection and Goa's tech-track development [a mechanism I didn't discuss; it's similar in nature to Hansa Teutonica's system]. I find this part a bit blase, but the action selection is delicious.

In Titania, players direct three different lines of ships, which are owned by and available to all players, to various locations on the board which grant resources [or abilities to use up resources for points ] to the player who places in them or reaches them. These do variously uninteresting things, like giving you points or additional card draws [cards are used to limit the color of ships you may build on your turn] or resources which can build the "big point" items once the trail of ships reaches special destination sites on the board. The greater interest in the game seems to lie in the maneuvering of these shared slime trails of ships such that they go in directions that you will be able to leverage with your current asset / resource holdings on your next turn, but that your opponents will not be able to so leverage. If things go completely awry, midway through the game the entire board resets [all the trails disappear] and players begin again, with a slightly different set of incentives due to prior placements / construction on the board. It's a classic-style Hans im Glück title that seems to have been released 10 years too late, as it fits in much better with their offerings from 1996-2000 than from 2006-2010.

And so on.

Even in his less "trail"-driven titles, there is a great emphasis on the timing and sequences of actions and resource collection / utilization. In Jambo, for instance, a player gets [surprise! 5!] actions on their turn, which must be split up across the actions of drawing cards, playing tech cards, using tech cards, buying resources, selling resources [i.e. getting points], and deploying one-time-use special power cards. Managing a "chain" of actions within and between your turns that efficiently leverages whatever the deck throws your way is the key to success in the game. Getting the chain out of sync or in the wrong order will see you wasting turns on drawing cards [of which you may only keep 1, regardless of how many you draw] looking for something to kickstart your progress.

I see Dorn, in general, as a sort of mezzanine designer voice in the "resource / action management" subgenre of Euro gaming, standing between directly interactive titles like Puerto Rico or Princes of Florence and today's more indirect titles like Agricola or Trajan. All of these games [like many of Dorn's] have player boards / player tableaus, and so all look like "multiplayer solitaire", but the systems that are built up around them have quite a diversity of depths of interaction. He is a few steps closer to Puerto Rico / Princes of Florence / etc, but in his funky action-selection mechanisms you can see inklings of Feld and the rest.

Rumor has it that he no longer considers his bigger designs necessary [halfway through the interview] in the spate of gamer-game explosions we see with every new Essen, but I think that his unique "classic German" style of design is still needed and welcome in the hobby. The fact that he had a SdJ nominee just this past year, and an as-yet well-received gamery-game shows that, whatever he says, he's not quite done yet.

Though he has had at least 1 game published in all but 1 year [1993] out of the past 20 years, many gamers probably don't even recognize his name, or if they do would be hard-pressed to identify any of his titles. His focus shifts regularly [from Euro games, to card games, to kids games, back to Euros] and he designs in genres [trick-taking, memory] that are not popular and for publishers [Hans im Gluck, Ravensburger] that don't export regularly. This combination has not helped his popularity.

Despite having two relatively successful recent titles with co-designer Ralf zur Linde [of Finca fame], Milestones and Pergamon, his most popular and highest-ranked game remains the 15 year old auction super-filler, For Sale. This is appropriate, since Dorra's designs are typically characterized by auction-like [though not often explicitly auction-based] mechanisms. In his designs, Applecline's Auction Grand Unification Theory finds full expression, even moreso than in those of Applecline's favored auction-heavy designer, Reiner Knizia.

Nearly all of Dorra's games involve players competing for the ownership of a pool of resources, which tend to be distributed either winner-takes-all or one-per-player [with order of claim an important consideration]. This is the 1st of Applecline's 5 elements of auctions [and also involves the 5th to a large extent]. Dorra also is fond of mechanisms wherein the value or the cost of some resource steadily rises until it is claimed or bought [the 4th, and possibly 3rd, element]. Winning a Dorra game consists of laying claim to the most valuable pool resources by expending the least of your own.

For example:

In Medina, the players jointly build up the Arabian city of Medina by filling it with palaces in 4 colors. Each player may claim 1 palace of each color during the course of the game, but before this claim is made, the single palace [allowed at a time] on the board of that color potentially belongs to anyone. On their turn, a player can extend any currently unclaimed palace that they like. This leads to a game of chicken that is a sort of reverse Dutch auction, where the value of the item [the palace] being offered steadily rises [as players extend the palace] until someone bites and lays claim to it. There are other bonuses, and secondary ways to extend even completed palaces, that muddy up the waters and make evaluation of the growing palaces quite difficult. By restricting each player to claiming only 1 of each color palace in the game, Dorra creates a very difficult timing and valuation exercise; the restriction also makes the game rather spiteful and dynamic, as players who have already claimed a palace of a given color will try in any way they can to limit the value of others of that color.

In Buccaneer, the players take the role of pirates intent on plundering a series of merchant ships. The only problem is that there isn't any clear leader to captain the crew! Players take it in turn to add a pirate to an existing crew controlled by an opponent, and so become the captain of the entire lot of loutish mutineers. Once a crew has become large enough, its captain can choose to send it out to plunder one of the available merchant ships. When this happens, the gold earned from the raid is distributed to every player who had a pirate in that crew, according to the value of the pirates [which have a range of values around 1 to 5], with the captain keeping any remaining amount. There are two auction-like mechanisms here, the "bidding" for control of the larger crews by adding to them and the intertwined "bidding" for part of the bounty that the crew eventually receives from the raid [whoever captained the venture]. The captain also gets an additional bonus treasure token that goes toward set collection. The effect would seem to be [I haven't played this one] a similar "chicken" style reverse auction as in Medina.

In Intrigue, the players engage in what might be the most direct and barebones negotiation game ever. The items to be negotiated over are salaries paid out to the owning player every turn. The means of negotiation is outright bribery to the employer whose estate pays the salaries. When a player is alone in seeking a job, the negotiation is simply for the amount of the salary [there are 5 possible values]. When 2 or more players are seeking the same employment, the negotiation is for both the job itself and the salary. The trouble is that all of the bribe money is given before the job is assigned and that the employer is under no obligation to give the job to the person who bribed him the most, nor to give the salary promised when the bribe was accepted. This breaks one of the cardinal rules of Applecline's understanding of auction [#5, that the highest-bid always wins], but it remains an auction game in its essentials, only one based on trust rather than evaluation. There is also a variant from the author wherein the loser gets their bribe back and promises are binding; with or without it, the resource deployment here seems to me to exemplify Dorra's style perfectly.

And so on.

Dorra is very fond of the Simultaneous Action Selection mechanism, as well as game structures that reveal [fully or partially / limited by memory] the assets of the other players that they will use in the "bidding" parts of the game. This combination lends his games a distinct "game theory" like flavor, where you mostly know the other players' incentives and how they interact with your own / how you can influence them, and have to guess what they will do in order to succeed.

In Streetcar, for instance, the players' tile holdings are made public, but their connection goals are hidden and must be deduced. In Zing! and Nyet!, the players' bids reveal considerably more about the strength of their hand [particularly in what suits] than a typical trick-taking bidding phase does. In Turn the Tide, the players' hands of cards are not redealt after each round of play, but simply passed to the next player in order.

He seems to go wherever the wind blows, focusing most recently on mid-weight Euros like Pergamon and Milestones. I'd like to see him get back to his trick-taking and funky-auction roots; his designs in these areas are among the best offerings in those genres. I seem to have been a small part of a spark of interest that seems to have recently been lit under the long-languishing MarraCash, and hope that continues.

Feld's games are nearly always multifaceted, full of many interlocking mechanisms and subsystems, but the thing that binds them is an emphasis on action diversity and action efficiency within the framework of a system with either very clear "limits to growth" behavior or a system of "demand" thresholds placed on the player by the game or their opponents [in the latter case, the mechanism chosen is typically majority scoring].

While his games are often economic snowballs of leveraging increasingly large infrastructure, they are not economic avalanches that simply build and build without limit. It is in the novel limiting factors he deploys that players typically find the most of interest in Feld's games. Where a typical snowball game like Through the Ages limits players through increased overhead / variable costs, Feld's games do so through difficult to control action activation systems.

There are usually blatant tradeoffs presented between specialization and diversity in a Feld game. The value of specialization is Feld's fondness for triangular scoring / income systems, majority bonuses, and infrastructure development. The value of diversity is the flexibility to take advantage of nearly any outcome in a system of action-taking that is often not kind to players. Striking a balance of specialization and diversity, and catching a stroke of luck, are keys to winning a Feld game.

For example:

In Macao, the players take the role of Portuguese merchants arranging trade routes with the far east. The game is a relatively straightforward cube churner in large part: Players will collect cubes in various colors, use them to build up a personal infrastructure that can turn the rest of them into money or points, or use them to pursue various other secondary set collection goals. At the beginning of the game, the 6 different cube colors are largely identical and interchangeable. A player may choose any direction to develop their infrastructure and have it be as successful as any other. The problem is that the availability of cubes is not identical across the 6 colors, but determined randomly by the memorable windrose mechanism. The infrastructure / buildings are designed such that specializing in a single color is generally the best way to get points if the timing and availability of those cubes works to your favor; of course, the wind[rose] of fate is fickle and this won't happen, so you have to find a way to create an infrastructure that can use a wide and unpredictable variety of resources effectively.

In Notre Dame, the players take the role of Parisian patrons contributing to the wealth of the city and the raising of the eponymous cathedral. There are 3 essential resources: cubes, coins, and victory points. [Sounding familiarish? Yes, this is another relatively straightforward cube churner.] Aside from earning VPs directly, the game gives players various actions that can turn money or cubes into VPs [yes, kind of exactly like Macao does] and such. The game has built-in incentives toward specialization in any of the 3 resource areas, in that the more resources you devote to particular actions in the game the more productive they become in their ability to grant you their rewards [an action that lets you get more cubes, for instance, gives you 3 instead of 1 if you built up its capacity; same for the VP-granting action, and the money-granting action]. The catch is that the activation of your action infrastructure is determined by a card draft, and your opponents are very unlikely to pass you what you need to activate your specialty. There is also a limiting variable cost [rats] that must be managed, as well as a bit of a pseudo-majority system [the cathedral].

In Trajan, the players navigate a complicated system of action and bonus action activation fueled by a Mancala-based system. Every action [of six possible] taken really demands specialization to function to its fullest potential, but the Mancala rondel is not setup to allow players to easily specialize. A large part of the game is in increasing the effectiveness of the actions you choose to take less frequently [by assigning bonus scoring opportunities to them, or by using them to accrue bonus action opportunities]. Beyond the sheer planning difficulties of working the Mancala system, there are set collection demands to be met [on penalty of VP loss] each turn that require players to divert attention from their most direct path through the system. There are majority bonus mechanisms as well. The game has a sort of "cobbled together" feel, in that every action drives its own little "mini-game" of sorts; balancing the demands and scoring opportunities of all of these microcosms is the chief challenge of the game. More than in most of his other games, Feld's love of competing, mutually limiting demands on your efficiency is displayed quite prominently here in what seems to be his magnum opus.

And on. "So" doesn't show up 'til two rounds later.

Feld likes penalties almost as much as he likes triangular scoring efficiencies. In many of his games, there are losses to be avoided as well as gains to be had. The loss is usually triggered by a lapse in efficiency beneath a certain "bare minimum" threshold. Pseudo-paradoxically, it's not always easy to meet the "bare minimum" if you're looking to be really really efficient in the use of any one particular action or scoring opportunity.

Nowhere is this really felt more than in In the Year of the Dragon, one of the more brutal of his games. The eponymous "year" in the game consists of a string of event tiles laid out before it begins, each of which specifying some condition that must be met to gain points or avoid penalties [usually the latter]. Players have to carefully choose which "checks" to intentionally fail as it is nearly impossible to complete them all and stand a chance of winning.

The challenge, then, is to manage waste [keeping it low] while maximizing output [efficiency]. "Waste management" might be a relatively good two-word description of Feld's style; a single wasted action or wasted resource usually carries with it a broad array of consequences [both foreseeable and unpredictable]. Keeping these wasteful outcomes to a minimum while continually building up a larger infrastructure is one of the more interesting features of his designs.

Games that [allegedly; I don't know this genre well] share traits with Feld's designs include Troyes, Glen More, and Village.

One of the more polarizing designers in the hobby, Herr Knizia is also among the most prolific, with over 400 unique titles to his credit in the BGG catalog. He is a mathematician and his games are known [deservedly or not] for being dry, calculating affairs with awkward to explain scoring mechanisms, as attested to in a microbadge created by his fans:

The overarching design feature of Knizia's games is captured by a famous quote attributed to him: "When playing a game, the goal is to win; but it is the goal that is important, not the winning." [This quote, coincidentally, also has its own microbadge: ] More than those of any other designer, Knizia's games proceed from their goals, victory conditions, and [yes] scoring mechanisms.

Despite his reputation, very few of Knizia's games actually have complicated scoring mechanisms, however. What they usually do have are multiple competing scoring mechanisms or scoring opportunities. The types of goals Knizia likes to design toward are those that reward maximizing the gain of a multidimensional portfolio of assets by navigating and managing a structure of ever-changing risks.

Knizia's designs favor scoring mechanisms wherein VPs are very rarely secured immediately and the bulk of a player's final score is in constant flux and remains uncertain until very near the end of the game or round. This provides the risk management element he is known for; a large part of succeeding in a Knizia game is comprised of capitalizing on assets with uncertain or low liquidity.

A large part of gameplay in Knizia's designs is the competitors' bumping, grinding shift of the shared game space until favorable conditions are reached for a player to capitalize on their holdings. There is also a strong element of asset portfolio management as players seek to obtain new assets that best fit their perception of the prevailing "market" trends.

For example:

In Lost Cities, the players have a relatively simple goal: Play cards [1-10 in 5 suits] to exceed a sum total of 20 points by as much as possible in each suit played, while laying down as many scoring multipliers as possible for the suits with the highest totals. The problem is that the cards have to be played in increasing numeric order, and that all multiplier cards have to be played before any number cards are played... and of course players aren't commonly dealt cards in a helpful x2-x3-x4-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 sequence as they'd like. Playing the game well consists of two aspects of risk / asset management: 1) Correctly gauging your likelihood of success in a given suit so that you can lay down the bonus multipliers before you start playing in that suit; 2) Biding your time through discards and "throwaway" suits until you have sufficient information to make the determination needed in #1. Playing the game very well consists of doing this simultaneously across all 5 suits in the game based on the information your opponent is implicitly giving you by their plays.

In Ra, the players "bid" for various lots of tiles depicting various aspects of a stereotypical ancient Egyptian civilization: impressive monuments, Pharaonic dynasties, cultural developments, farms along the Nile, and so on. Every category of tile has its own unique way of scoring based on set collection goals: monuments score for matched sets and for diverse collections, Pharoahs score in majority-bonus style, cultural developments are primarily used to avoid penalties but can provide points for sufficiently diverse sets, farms don't score points unless you also obtain a "flood" tile, and so on. You keep a certain portion of your collected portfolio of tiles from round to round [3 total], and you are challenged to find ways to both capitalize on what you've already collected and build a larger portfolio at the same time. The chief difficulty is that most scores are a threshold to be met [gaining a certain number of monuments; obtaining majority; etc] or a binary on/off switch [getting a flood, cultural development, etc]. Success is not a continuum; you either liquidate your assets or you don't.

In Tigris & Euphrates, the players lay tiles in 4 colors to develop "kingdoms" in ancient Mesopotamia, usually gaining corresponding color cubes for so doing. The goal is the scoring mechanism Knizia is most known for: "Your score is the number of cubes collected in your least numerous color." The most basic move is to lay a tile into a kingdom and collect a matching cube if you have the matching "leader" in that kingdom; the problem is that you will never win the game this way, since you simply won't get enough tiles / plays over the course of the game to build up enough cubes in each color if you collect them one at a time. There are better ways to get cubes: by winning a "conflict" with another kingdom and gaining a cube for every tile it had in the relevant color, and by building "monuments" that provide free cubes every turn to various leaders in that kingdom. Every play changes your ability to take advantage of these high-income moves, and winning the game consists of continually aligning your hand of tiles to the shifting opportunities on the board. And, to do this in the context of diversifying across all 4 colors.

In Amun-Re, the players bid for control of various regions depicting various aspects of a stereotypical ancient Egyptian civilization: impressive monuments, Pharaonic dynasties, cultural developments, farms along the Nile, and--wait a minute... didn't we just do this? Yep; like Ra, this is a game of portfolio development along multiple axes with the eventual goal of the most effective liquidation possible. A player's assets consist of 3 regions per scoring round, with attached farms, pyramids, and temples. A sealed bid at the end of each round determines the profitability of the farms and temples; the pyramids score 3 ways: on their own, in completed sets, and for majorities on either side of the Nile. Every bid for a region must be weighed against its potential contribution toward each of these 3 areas of competition, and the subsequent building phase is a further refinement of that potential. Guiding these decisions is a 3rd axis of refinement in the form of bonus scoring cards that require your portfolio to meet various criteria. These are scored all or nothing, and converting on them is key to victory.

In Stephensons Rocket, the players invest in the development of the British railway system in 3 distinct ways: by claiming goods that will be delivered from each city the new railways connect to, by claiming stations along the route that serve as switchovers between towns, and by claiming stocks in the railroads they hope will be most successful. Each of these scores in a separate majority-bonus subgame, but the 3 types of assets [goods, stations, shares] are interdependent, since the scoring of all 3 depends on how and where the tracks are connected. The game has a palpable sense of emergent cooperation between players, and the most important part of decision-making in the game is determining whose levers to pull and buttons to push and in what manner to do so. All 3 types of assets are particularly illiquid, and converting them into VP once claimed is a difficult process for which you need the help of other players. Of course, this help comes unwittingly; you can't simply tell your opponents what to do. There is, however, a "veto" phase in which you can tell them what not to do.

My personal favorite Knizian quirk [though it is not uniquely his, of course] is the two-action turn. Action-Point Allowance games are great, of course, in that they create very dynamic turns, but they require balancing of action costs and can often lead to analysis paralysis. Knizia gets around that while maintaining the rapid pace of game state change by allowing only two actions.

Ironically, Herr Kramer himself is also repercussive. He has been an active hobby designer for nearly 40 years [his first credited design in BGG's database is Legemax from 1974], longer than even such industry stalwarts as Alan R. Moon or Richard H. Berg, and nearly rivaling the unsung Reinhold Wittig. Kramer is often credited [accurately or not] with creating the victory point track and the area majority and action point genres.

His magnum opus, El Grande, is the oldest non-traditional game [i.e. excepting Go, Tichu--a minor Zheng Fen variant--,and Crokinole] in BGG's Top 50 ranked games, a testament to the longevity and continued relevance of his work. This is particularly appropriate, as longevity and continued relevance are mechanical, as well as ludological, hallmarks of his game designs. Decisions in a Kramer game have impacts on multiple time scales simultaneously.

Kramer employs a lot of multiple scoring round structures and special scoring opportunity mechanisms, where the infrastructure that players build up persists throughout the game and is leveraged multiple times [and often in multiple ways] to earn points. This gives his games a rich tactical backdrop, since every move must be weighed against its immediate use, or at least its use in the most imminent scoring opportunity, as well at its infrastructure value for bigger opportunities to come.

For example:

In Hacienda, the players expand land claims and animal herds and are judged in two scoring rounds for the size and connectivity [markets reached, water surrounded] of their claims and herds. The multiscalar element arises in that the early game is about money and resource management, and players often take the most direct and efficient routes to market [which generates cash] so as to conserve. The easiest next step is simply to expand "close to home", continuing to deliver to the same market and develop the same land; this is not a very valuable action, points-wise, however. The game rewards expansion to multiple markets, which are costly to reach, as well as careful consideration of the shape [as well as size] of land claims and herds so that wells and reservoirs [which grant points] may be dug around them; often the most potentially valuable shapes are not the most efficient. There is also another special scoring opportunity, the eponymous haciendas, which may be bought for very large chains [which require costly specialization of resources]. The tactical balance is very rich.

In Colosseum, The Princes of Florence, and Master Builder [all closely related], the players navigate an auction round aimed at set collection followed by an action / scoring round in which the sets are judged, and then repeat the process until the end of the game. In all of these games, the large majority of a player's collected resources persist after having been scored, whereas the set collection goal to which they were applied is removed from play; this means that assets continue to turnover and be scored toward multiple set collection goals. In Colosseum, even the previously completed goals persist as scoring bonuses toward future scoring. In the early stages of these games, players will be forced either to pursue smaller goals or to settle for fulfilling fewer of the requirements of the goals that are available to them. Tactical decision-making in the game is a balance between getting the best resources for completing your immediate goal of interest and getting the resources that will most flexibly allow you to complete future goals; the player that wins the game will be able to make these two time-scales overlap and reinforce each other.

In the games of The Mask Trilogy, as well as the apocryphal member Torres, the players work [pseudo-]together to develop and/or explore a shared landscape and are rewarded multiple times during the game for control [through majority or dominance or other claim] of portions of that landscape. In Mexica and Java in particular, a sharp distinction is also drawn between game elements that provide points immediately, elements that provide points during mid-game scoring, and elements that provide points only in the final scoring. This "now, then, later" method of scoring is a hallmark of Kramer's designs, and is particularly strong here. In all of the four games in the "trilogy", the shared landscape persists throughout all time phases of the game and its development shapes the actions of players in each portion of the game, with a general trend of catch-as-catch-can in the early game where very little has been developed that shifts toward a positional struggle for the highest scoring claims for the end game. These games also prominently feature Kramer's proclivity toward action-point allowance games and each have a large menu of possible player actions to spend points on.

In Heimlich & Co. and City, two old roll-and-move family-style games, the same features are evident despite the simplicity of the games. In Heimlich, players are assigned secret identities from among a pool of 7 colored pawns. On their turn, they roll a die and make moves for any combination of pawns they like up to the number of movement points rolled. Spaces on the board consist of scoring values from -3 to +10. The object is to get the colored pawn matching your secret identity onto a higher scoring space when a scoring round is activated, but to do so in such a way as to not tip off your identity [because your opponents will simply see you favoring that color and move it to a lower scoring space; additionally, there are variants where you gain / lose points for guessing at secret identities]. The real object of the game is to figure out a way to keep your pawn on the higher scoring spaces for multiple scoring rounds at a time. There are numerous cute ways to do this: you can hold back on a 6 or 7 and be content that something else will be a better target for moving off to a low scoring space; you can choose to move the scoring activator [which sits on a space on the board and triggers scoring when landed on] to a space you think the next player will favor [while your pawn remains on the place it just scored for]; and so on.

In City, reimplemented as The Market of Alturien [my personal choice for most underrated game on the Geek, by the way], players buy spaces on a [mostly] circular track, build trading houses on those spaces, roll dice to move pawns around the board so as to land on spaces, and receive money when the pawns land on their spaces based on the number of houses they have [yes, this is Kramer's take on Monopoly]. Players control the direction in which pawns may move [they don't simply circle the track], and have the ability to purchase or develop properties anywhere [unlike Monopoly, players have no on-board avatar; the pawns are all neutral buyers that anyone may move]. This leads to players trading off between prime real estate [intersections, mostly, but also competition for area majority bonuses] and areas that are likely to be hit soon by the moving pawns; these long-term vs short-term tensions are typical of Kramer's style. Additionally, there is an added incentive to prioritize the long-term development, since every intersection has a special rule for buyers; in general, only the buyer pawn that was actually moved on any given turn will pay out to the business it stops on, but if any pawns remain on any of your intersection spaces from having landed there in a prior turn, they also pay out. This drives some fun "take one for the team" play in moving pawns off of these repercussive payouts.

And so on, for decades.

Kramer is also well known for being a collaborative designer. Only between 20% to 25% of his top 50 or so games are sole-author creations. His primary co-design partner is Michael Kiesling, but he has worked with at least a dozen other authors [the next most frequent being Richard Ulrich]. I suspect the built-in feedback loop / sounding board of the co-design relationship is largely the reason why Kramer's games always feel well-conceived, well-playtested, and well-balanced.

Kramer is kind of an unsung hero [at least in the English-speaking circles I game and/or chat with; maybe it's different in mainland Europe / Germany?] "hiding in plain sight", as far as I can tell. He's at least as good and as influential as Knizia, yet judging by "fandom" on his designer page and ownership of his microbadges, he's only 1/3rd as popular. He's also dwarfed by relatively "young" upstarts like Feld and Chvatil, being about 1/2 as popular as either. It's hard to fathom.

More than most designers, Kramer is consistent in the quality and style of the games he has produced over the years. He no longer dominates the BGG Top-100, and his "big" newer games [The Palaces of Carrara, Artus, and Seeland] are certainly not flying up the charts, but unlike, say, Reiner Knizia, I think this is an artifact of the average BGGer's tastes changing and not the result of Kramer's design quality changing. He was and remains a designer worth watching.

Suddenly a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

I have an apology to what is left of my subscriber base:

I have been incredibly slow of late in putting up posts.

I have two or three posts actually in progress, but they languish for want of impulse, creativity, or motivation. Take your pick, as they probably all apply.

I think I can make it through what I intend to write about here in one setting, and I've got nothing better to do [up at night, can't sleep, contemplative, etc].

Here goes.

A Force to be Reckoned With

If I were to identify one element or trait that describes what I enjoy in games, which would be enough to provide sufficient information for a reasonable summary to a fellow gamer, it would be dynamism.

By this, I do not mean simply that the games I enjoy are exciting or interactive in play, but rather that they possess a quality that is related to the [a?] rigorous definition of "dynamics" as a field of study.

Dynamics is the study of forces [from Gr. "dyna-" = "power", "force", etc]. More particularly, it is the study of the effects and interactions of forces. That is, to motion and change as a system or a process.

The processes of motion and change in general are typically present in any game, however, so what do I mean in particular by the application of this term to game design as a differentiating factor?

Two things:

1) Dynamic games have changing structures of costs and incentives. Such changing structures are state-dependent rather than sequential or stochastic. They both depend and impinge primarily on player choice.

2) Dynamic games have interdependencies between players and the systems they inhabit in the game. The forces which act on players in the game come from multiple sources and have multiple interlocking effects.

This is not a direct representation of these concepts, but gets across the same gestalt in short order. Dynamic games depend on themselves [that is, on their individual instantiations in a play session] and not on their rules.

The essence of this self-referential graph [the world's first "Quined" graph?] is reproducible in any number of configurations, and each minor shift toward a new one would necessitate sweeping changes to the whole.

The "rules" of the graph affect how it must be "played", but the shape and result of the graph depends only on some initial seeds [how thick the lines are, what the dimensions are of the shapes, etc] and their dependencies.

The flow of a dynamic game is the same as this "dynamic" graph. The rules govern how the game is to be played, but the values and incentives that are the game as such grow out of the rules rather than are set by them.

Seeking Change for a Change

What in the world is a "[state-dependent] changing structure of costs and incentives"? Perhaps there are more compelling instantiations than the following, but essentially all that I have in mind is the situation in which numbers or values in the game are not hard-coded into the rules but are dependent on some portion of the game state.

For instance:

- In Acquire, the price to be paid [buying or selling] for a stock is neither preset at a certain level, nor increased in predictable sequential fashion over time, nor adjusted randomly* by some "random walk" process but changes solely based on player actions and is determined by some dynamic metric: the size of the associated hotel chain.

[* the probability distribution governing this, and thus the expected and possible values at any point, would still be part of "the rules"]

- In Web of Power, the value of a[n area majority] scoring region on the board is not preset to a certain amount, nor changed by fiat of a player, but depends on the number of houses each player manages to get into the region. Similarly, the incentives and costs of the ambassador scoring opportunities are not preset values, but depend on house placements.

- In Medieval Merchant, the income gained by players from their cities on each turn is not a fixed amount, nor even an amount based on a mathematical progression or payout schedule [a la Power Grid's bureaucracy phase], but dependent on both a player's choice to build or tax and on the level of competition in each city in question when the choice is made.

- In Modern Art, the value of the paintings being auctioned is not inherent in the items themselves, nor a probability function around an average payout when the cashing-out-your-chips phase comes, but is determined instead by how many other paintings by the same artist were sold during that round of auctions as well as in previous rounds.

- In Hacienda [an underestimated light-/mid-weight rail game], the money earned "bringing a herd to market" [connecting to a city] is not dependent on preset values for the city or for connections in general, but on the size of the herd and its farmland at the time a connection is made; money earned at "harvest" depends on the size of the farm.

This is not a review-oriented post, so I hope these brief snippets will suffice as examples. There are many more, of course, that could be given.

Essentially, any game with a preponderance of the words "per" or "for each" or "based on", or with emphasis on quantities such as "the most" or "the highest" or "the number of", probably fits at least partially into this broad categorization. This doesn't seem a terribly thrilling or uncommon concept at all. Certainly not worth fussing over. Surely every game has something like this?

Or does it?

Counter-examples abound in mass-market titles. The values and payments made in Life or Monopoly, for instance, are nearly all hard-coded into the board and the rules. Relatively low-dynamism games are found in the hobby, too. Settlers of Catan is impressively devoid of it [aside from the "longest road" battle], yet the preset values and board are necessary to support trading and expansion.

Is it a bad thing for a game not to be "dynamic" in this way? Are the types of games I list inherently better or deeper just because of this feature? Well, no... and that's not the point of this post. It's just a preference of mine, and something that I find interesting for its own sake. It also strikes me as one of the more modern design features in our entire hobby; it is like a cooperation between player and designer.

To a large extent, this kind of design allows and sometimes forces players to set their own goals in the game and find their own "paths to victory" within the game space. Because values drive player choice in a game, allowing the values to vary based on player choice means that players can have a hand in shaping their own destiny. Their choices now will affect the substance and content of the choices they face later.

That's compelling to me, and it's more than just a typical engine-building game of piecing together the requisite parts of a combo-driven victory-point generator. Getting a building that generates 5 stone a turn and next turn one that turns 3 stone into 10 VP doesn't change the relative cost structure you face, at least not in the dynamic self-referential way I have been discussing. It's just a choice within the over-arching incentives.

It's a fine line, perhaps, between that example and a "dynamic" game as above. It might be as simple as there being many different stone -> VP buildings available, so that each player has to choose their own rate of exchange. It might be that players could get X VP per stone where X is defined as the number of Y buildings the player has access to. These seem insignificant modifications, but I think they increase dynamism.

And I like dynamism.

I like it so much that I instinctively look for it in games and seek to add it via houserule or variant if it doesn't seem to be prevalent enough. A not-too-unrecent example was during playtesting / communal development and criticism of an Ace variant for the Decktet resource-management / tableau-building game of Magnate. The initial suggestion was that an Ace would count as a value equal to the number of other cards you had in the column that shared its suit. Yay! Dynamic value!

What I took umbrage with was the comparatively more boring cost of playing the Ace: 3 resource chips. I suggested that it, too, be dynamic, based [like the eventual value] on the number of matching cards in the column where you want to play it. The designer shot back that he didn't see either the need for the added complexity or the value to the game of having the cost dynamic. I eventually conceded both points, begrudgingly, but I've come to appreciate, I think, the wisdom of his perspective.

There can be a problem with too much dynamism and too many floating values, and not just in terms of rules complexity. The problem is one of calculability and choice. To calculate anything accurately in the context of mobile objects [or values], you need a fixed vantage point for reference [or at least a point fixed relative to the moving body]. In game terms, if all of your costs and all of your values are dynamic, you either have to set a maximization function on the distance [if that's the appropriate relationship] or fix one end for reference.

It can be difficult to accurately determine, when either the low or the high point of a range is variable and both are independently difficult / costly to move, whether it is more effective to decrease the low end or increase the high end [assuming "maximum separation" is the goal]. In practice, you will probably consider one end fixed in the short-term and work on moving the other, then consider it fixed at a certain point and shift toward the original fixed end. This is clunky and unnecessary, unless the exact timing of that shift is something of interest for the design.

Much better is a mixed-model.

If you preset the value of one end of the range, you can maintain the difficulty and interest of controlling a dynamically-determined value on the other end while simultaneously maintaining the ability of players to make sane judgments among alternative courses of action. I have only chosen the "profit margin" between value and cost as an example of convenience, but I think the principal of a fixed reference point applies to nearly any "dynamic" game.

That reference point can be something as trivial as a hard end-game value for leftover resources, for example. "Each $5 is worth 1 VP at game end" or "Each 3 cubes of the same color leftover are worth 1 VP at game end" or some such. Even if the game is such that players never take advantage of this scoring, it is incredibly helpful as a standard for measuring other sources of scoring potential against. It allows for true and accurate opportunity cost analysis.

For instance, if you have the opportunity to spend $2 to convert 3 Stone to 3 VP or $4 to convert 2 Wood to 3 VP, and both of the above end-game conditions apply, you can use the relative distance moved from those two fixed reference points at end-game to compute the respective values [at least short-term] of these two moves. For Stone, you lose 0.4 VP in $ and 1 VP in cubes, for a gain of 1.6 VP; for Wood, you lose 0.8 VP in $ and 0.67 VP in cubes, for a gain of 1.53 VP.

Even if the $ cost of getting Stone or Wood is subject to change and if different scoring opportunities might present themselves next round, this is a cold-hard mathematical fact about the relative value of these options now. If you did not have the base-line for comparison, however, you'd be forced to guess at future game states to determine whether it was better to have $2 more or 3 stone more. You may still do that, of course, but now you have a better context for it.

We're All in This Together

Much more interesting still is the "second-order" dynamism wherein players directly, or mediated through some game system, impact the changing incentive structures faced by their opponents. Most [all?] of the games I cited as explicit examples above fall into this category, but it's not a necessity that a "first-order" dynamic game have this feature. It is, however, for folks like me who enjoy this sort of thing a bit of a holy grail feature. We are like moths to so many candles.

There are two things I can do to your incentive structure in a good second-order dynamic game [and the strength of such a game seems to me to subsist in how interesting and difficult they are to do]:

1) I can make choices that overtly and directly change your cost and/or value calculi. For instance, I could urbanize a town right out from under your most profitable route in Age of Steam [making it a lousy 2-stop route] which might lead you to build track elsewhere, deliver different cubes in the scoring round, and so on. Or, I might plop down a green/blue monument in Tigris & Euphrates using green tiles in a kingdom where I have a blue leader, hoping you'll then want to knock the green dude out.

2) I can make choices that shape the environmental context in which the players operate during the game, leading to intermediate or long-term changes to your incentives. For instance, I may begin building up a military powerhouse in Through The Ages, causing you to reconsider the peaceful strategy you had planned and maybe add a bit more colonization to the mix as a backup. Or, I could purchase an out-of-the-way shop in the streets of MarraCash, which might make you consider what would be worth owning along the way.

These types of games require not only the type of opportunity and incentive analysis discussed above, and the ability to manipulate your own dynamic value axes to your benefit, but in addition the bewilderingly difficult skill of being able to interpret and predict the mental analyses being performed by every other player at the table along the same axes so that you can interject your malevolent will into their finely honed machine such that their value structure disintegrates. Games like this may be light-hearted, but are not for the faint-hearted.

Note that these games are not always explicitly mean-spirited. In fact, there are many that are quite "friendly" and constructive in their own way. Marracash that I mentioned above is a wonderful example. The game is setup to provide you with incentives to help your opponents do well, and for them to do the same for you. There is not a whit of destruction or loss of accrued value [loss of potential value, sure] in the game. Rather, the game consists of trying to get other players to do as much for you as possible while offering to do as little as possible for them.

Note also that even though the words "offer", "help", "threaten", etc are bandied about in discussion of such games that relatively few of them allow explicit negotiation. What is meant, instead, is that the interlocking of players' tactical decisions is so great and the interdependency of players' strategic positions so high that a well-executed move by a given player implicitly "invites" a particular response on the part of their opponents. The invitation might be "Let me tag along! I'm only getting half the points you are!" or other seemingly innocuous interactions implied by positions taken.

The skill in such games is largely in setting up these "invitations" convincingly and interpreting the actual innocuousness of those presented to you. It is not quite as simple a mechanism as the meta-gaming "bluff" in your typical "let's take over the world together" American-style game, but rather something a little more subtle yet [importantly] laden with more information. A bluff, of necessity, entails that some important element of the offered invitation is hidden or concealed. In a game with this sort of dynamism, the offer is typically wide open for perusal in its entirety; it is only the implications of it that are uncertain.

Whether you are destructive or constructive, a quiet strategist or an active haranguer, I think you can find something in this general genre of games to excite you. I don't think you should write them off.

Whether you will fall in love with this type of game as I have depends on other factors, particularly your tolerance for incessant [if only implicitly conducted] judging of alternative schemes of action against each other with regard to their likely impact on the incentives that will guide your opponents' future actions. Additionally, because these games are played "above the table" [between the players, eyes up; not within the players, nose down], there is an oft-encountered side-effect that the games present a drab or "abstract" appearance. This is because the players themselves, rather than the story or the artwork or even the theme, provide the interest in the game.

While this isn't a review post, if you are interested in this sort of thing, I think most of the games I've highlighted above [Through The Ages excepted; it just provided a single useful example] would be wonderful introductions to this sort of thing. They are, of course, my own personal biases. If you're interested in other personal biases concerning this basic style of play, they really aren't that hard to find once you know what to look for. I don't name-drop other users often except to interact directly with content they've put up elsewhere [see above], but if you're clever you might find a few folks hidden in my profile, most of whom are there because they share my taste for this sort of thing.

Whatever you do with this post, more than anything I hope that next time you're staring at a little kingdom of black boxes on the player board in front of you that you think about how much more fun and dynamic that game could be.

Suddenly a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Very rarely do I make a blog post with the direct intention of one-upping another blogger, writer, or podcaster, but in this particular case the entire impetus behind this post is that I think I can do better.

Perhaps because of the podcast format or perhaps because of time limits or breadth of scope*, the Ludology guys really swept over a lot of ground rather quickly and made a bit of a muddle of things in the process.

[* I believe this to be the case rather than misinformation. Geoff, at least, has a number of excellent "Game Tech" segments that display quite clearly that he is capable of concise and accurate analysis of randomness.]

Geoff and Ryan touched on an awful lot of topics that are central to a proper understanding of randomness, but didn't really cover any of them in much detail or introduce them in a way that I found worked very effectively.

So, in this post I intend to discuss what randomness is, why it matters and occurs in gaming, how we can interpret and analyze randomness, and when it is or is not an appropriate game mechanism for a game design.

Alea iacta est! Or, what is randomness?

"Random" is the term we use to characterize data-generating processes that produce indeterminate results whose relative frequency of occurrence is defined by a probability function [which may not be known or knowable].

Admittedly, that's a bit of a mouthful, so let's break down the individual elements.

Data-Generating Processes

Randomness occurs in and is primarily concerned with active processes. While passive events like receiving a "random" phone call from a friend, experiencing a "random" natural disaster, or encountering a "random" person on the street are typically characterized exactly as such, this is a different [more colloquial and imprecise] use of the word than that which we usually intend when we talk about randomness in a formal sense. Unless you are considering "waiting for a friend to call", "tracking natural disasters over time", or "observing people on the street" as an active experiment [in which you are mostly collecting non-data: nobody called, no disaster happened, no people were encountered], the untimely and unexpected event that happens "out of the blue" isn't random, only rarefied.

Furthermore, randomness is concerned with data, or information, about the outcome of said process. We might say "I got a phone call from Amy at 4:00 today"; "The hurricane had wind gusts of 100 mph and came aground on August 29th"; or "3 men and 5 women were walking down Main Street", and the thing that randomness would likely be concerned with [were these actual active processes] would be the numbers or things [gender, dates, etc] that could easily be represented as numbers. Randomness isn't [usually] concerned with the fact that you got a phone call or didn't ["It was random! It came out of nowhere!"], but with when the phone call happened, how strong the hurricane was, when it hit the epicenter of damage, or how many people of each gender were encountered.

The most common and easily understood example of a "data-generating process" is [fortunately for us!] a die roll.

The die is cast [alea iacta est]--the process--and then we read off the obtained result--some data is generated.

Indeterminate Results

There are processes that generate data that are nevertheless not random. An easy example would be me asking you for your name.

Presumably, if you're not a class clown, you will respond in the same way regardless of how or when or by whom the question is asked.

Your answer--the data generated by the process--is deterministic. You only have one name, and you provide that information to whoever wants it. Yes, obviously there are slight variations for formality, nicknames, etc. Even allowing for these variations, you do not have a set of possible names to provide to askers at random. If you are in a formal situation, you will give your formal name. If you are introducing yourself to a new friend, you might use your nickname. You would never write down "1 = Alex", "2 = Bobby", "3 = Chris", "4 = Dana", "5 = Erin", "6 = Francis" and then roll a die when asked what your name was. No parent is that mean to their child! You wouldn't even do this with variations on your name ["1 = Nathanael", "2 = Nate", "3 = Nate Straight", etc]. Instead, you [the data-generator] choose the result.

Using the die roll example, a deterministic process would be to roll the die and add the number of pips on the top and bottom faces. Because of the way dice are designed, this will always give you a result of 7. Regardless of how the die rolls, where it lands, what number is on top, or any other input or environmental factors, the outcome of the data-generating process will always be the same. This is also something that randomness is not concerned with. Instead, we are only concerned with processes that produce results that are not deterministically generated by the input factors. Importantly, even if the method of determinism is unknown, the process is still non-random. Imagine you have six levers, a black box, and a light. One lever [only] turns on the light. Even if you don't know which one it is, it is not a random process.

This is because it is not the case [even though it's the most likely interpretation by a careless / casual observer] that each lever has a "1 in 6 chance" of turning on the light.

There is no "chance", in fact. One lever has a 100% "chance" of turning on the light. The others have a 0% "chance" of turning it on. The only uncertainty is our own ignorance.

At best, we might be able to say "If we choose a lever at random"--say by rolling a die and counting off--"we have a 1 in 6 chance of choosing the lever that will turn on the light."

This may seem like pedantry, more relevant in a philosophical discussion of free will and determinism, but it is an important observation on what it means for an event to be "random".

Relative Frequency of Occurrence

The introduction of percents and fractions in the prior example is a good segue to the next element of randomness, that of relative frequency [as opposed to an absolute count].

When we discuss random events, we nearly always do so in terms of the proportion of occurrences of an event to the total number of outcomes or repetitions of the process.

Imagine a gambling game where you win the bet if you roll a 2 at least five times in ten die rolls. It matters quite a bit whether the game consists of rolling one or two dice.

Whether you roll one or two dice, there's [absolutely] only one way to get a 2. But what you care about is the fraction of the total "ways" the dice can fall that are 2's.

In just a moment, we will begin enumerating sets of possible outcomes. Some poor intuition [based on absolute rather than relative counting] about how randomness works might lead someone to say that because "2" is in both the set of all possible outcomes for the roll of one die and the set of all possible outcomes for the roll of two dice that the chances of getting a 2 are the same in either scenario. This sounds silly, but it is a type of error that is actually made by real people in more subtle real-world scenarios involving randomness or uncertainty and prediction. More precisely, confusion of absolute vs. relative frequency is appallingly commonplace [absolutely and relatively]. It is so pervasive that psychologists have discovered [pp. 4-7] it to be an innate inability in children to distinguish absolute and relative quantities in interpreting randomness.

Adults make similar mistakes, though. If presented a problem something like "Is a cure that saves the lives of 9,000 out of 100,000 infected people more effective than a cure that saves the lives of 90 out of 100 people?", people will incorrectly answer that the cure with the higher absolute effect must also be the cure most likely to help the relevant population. The confusion is also present in the use of phrases like "5% increase" to describe something already measured in percentage points and something measured in absolute terms. "Inflation increased by 5%" [YIKES!] might be written by someone who really means "prices increased by 5%" [who cares?]. Even more insidiously, people will misinterpret the fact that "there are a lot of black people in prison" as an indication that there is a high probability that a black person in society is or will become a criminal.

Probability Functions [Distributions]

What we need, then, is a way to talk about the relative frequency of the indeterminate results of a random data-generating process. This is what probability is for. Generally speaking, the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of times it happens to the total number of times we have looked to see whether it happened [the frequentist / empirical definition, if you care]. We might also conceive of it as the ratio of the total number of ways an event can happen to the total number of possible outcomes of the process that [sometimes] generates the event [the classical / theoretical definition, by the way]. We used both definitions previously in discussing the die roll game, and both are relatively [heh] intuitive. Under either definition, careful observation [for the frequentist] or counting [for the theoretician] will very often derive different probabilities for different events.

The mathematical equation or graphical representation that defines or describes the different probabilities associated with every individual possible outcome of a data-generating process is known as the probability function [or probability distribution] of that process. Sometimes the function is very simple [for a single die, it might be written as "Pr(x) = 1/6", read "the probability of event x is 1/6" where "x" can stand for any number in the set of possible outcomes], and sometimes it is more complicated. Often it can not be written in a single mathematical equation and is either presented graphically or as a set of equations. Another possible presentation of the relatively simple probabilities involved in gaming is just to make a two-column table, with the first column listing all the possible outcomes and the second column recording their associated probabilities of occurrence.

An important characteristic of a probability distribution is that the sum of all of the individual probabilities calculated for each possible outcome of the process will always be 100% [because something will happen].

And, by looking at the probability distribution, we can readily discuss the relative likelihood of an event as compared to another [by comparing their probabilities], as well in the context of all possible outcomes.

Lemme 'splain; no, dere ees too mush. Lemme sum up.

In summary, when we say a process is "random", we mean that there is no way to tell what the outcome of each run will be, but that we can predict the likely distribution of results over multiple repetitions.

Additionally, if we know the set of possible outcomes of the process and the probability distribution for it, we can at least say how likely a given outcome is even if we can never be certain it will happen.

Urning a living. Or, what are the types of random events?

Before we can discuss randomness in the context of gaming, we need to define at least one more element of the proper discussion and precise interpretation of random events.

If you've ever studied probability formally, you surely have encountered a problem like the balls-and-urn example. Probably you thought "What the balls is the deal with 'replacement'?"

In the classic urn-type problems, "with replacement" and "without replacement" are conditions that serve to mark off two different types of sequences of random events. If you pull a ball out of an urn, note its color, and then toss it back in ["replace" it], the next time you or anyone else pulls a ball out of the urn the probabilities of getting any particular color will remain the same as they were before your first pull. We say these different pulls [events] are independent of each other. If, however, when you pull the first ball out of the urn, you note its color and then stick it in your pocket ["without replacing" it], the next time you or anyone else pulls a ball out there will be one less of that color in the urn and the probability of getting that color [or, indeed, any other] will be different than they were before your first pull. We say these events are dependent.

Note that by "dependent" we do not mean that the actual color of the second ball you pull from the urn "depends" [in any way] on the color of the first ball you pulled out. What is meant is that the probability of getting any given color for the second ball depends ["is affected by"] the color of the first ball you pulled out [and didn't "replace"]. Again, this sounds like pedantry, but precision is very important when talking about probabilities. Even though we will commonly say that the "events are dependent", we primarily mean that their probability distributions are dependent, not that their eventual actual outcomes are. If the probability distribution for the second event in a series changes based on what happens in the first event, the two are dependent. If the probability distribution for the second event is the same no matter what happens first, they are independent.

In gaming, the most common examples of dependent and independent events are card draws and die rolls, respectively. If you draw a card from a deck, put it in your hand, and then draw another, the probability distribution for that second draw depends on your first.

Contrarily, if you roll a die, write down the result, and then roll another die, the probability distribution for that second die roll does not depend on any way on what happened in the first die roll. The common adage is that "dice have no memory".

Bonus Content: It's time to play.... Probability Mythbusters!

Most people with an modicum of probability training understand the "dice have no memory" thing, and even if they subconsciously feel that a string of six die rolls that results in 6-6-6-6-6-6 is more unlikely / odd than a string of six die rolls that results in [exactly] 6-5-4-3-2-1 or [even still] 6-2-3-1-5-4, they probably understand that each of these particular results [exactly as given] is equally unlikely. If, after the series of six 6's, they were asked if the odds were any different of the next die roll being a 6, they'd probably answer [out loud] "No, still 1/6 chance" even if they subconsciously felt otherwise. Where intelligent, educated people still do go wrong with predictable frequency is in the interpretation of the so-called "law of large numbers". The mistake is easy to make, and is related to the [rarely made] mistake of attributing dependence to a string of die rolls.

The mistake is this: The law of large numbers says [roughly] that with an adequately large sample size [number of die rolls], the observed relative frequency distribution will "look like" the predicted or theoretical probability distribution. That is, if we roll a die 600 times, we would expect 100 1's, 100 2's, 100 3's, and so forth, based on the probabilities of each possible outcome of a fair die. In any given series of 600 actual die rolls, we will observe slightly different frequencies [the odds of actually getting exactly 100 of each face are astronomically small], but the overall set of outcomes will probably be fairly evenly distributed across each result. Now, let's say you've already rolled 300 of those 600 attempts, but have only seen 25 5's [half of the expected 50 5's]; how many 5's do you expect to roll in the next 300 attempts? Will the overall frequency of each result "even out" in the end?

Many people's intuitive response is wrong. The correct answer is that the next 300 rolls will probably have 50 5's [same expectation as before] and that the overall number of 5's in this particular set of 600 rolls will likely be 75 [rather than the 100 expected], meaning that your final set of results will almost certainly be quite uneven.

The law of large numbers only says that as you increase the number of rolls in your sample, the extent to which you can expect the observed distribution in those rolls to match the predicted distribution increases. It does not say that a sample already observed to be unevenly distributed will be "corrected" by additional repetitions.

The additional repetitions themselves would have to be unevenly distributed [in the opposite direction] for that interpretation to be true, but the law says that they'll likely be even.

A further misunderstanding is that there is a magic number or a numerical threshold of rolls beyond which you can "start expecting" evenly distributed results from your sample.

Gamers will lament that "there are not enough rolls for the results to even out" in a game or ask "how many rolls should I have if I want to be sure that my game is balanced?"

The truth is that you always expect an even distribution, but that you can never be sure of it. The law only says that increasing rolls increases the expectation's accuracy.

Death and taxes. Or, is the only thing certain uncertainty?

The Ludology podcast I referenced previously began with the observation from Ryan that [paraphrased] "What most people seem to mean when they say a game is random is really that the game has a lot of uncertainty." This calls to mind two questions: 1) Is there any merit to this characterization?; 2) Is the distinction itself even significant? I'll attempt to tackle #1 a bit later. First we should ask, is there really a difference between randomness and uncertainty? Isn't is part of what randomness means that the results aren't certain ["indeterminate" was the word I used previously]? Is Ryan making a distinction without a difference for the purpose of filling in time in the podcast? I don't think so, but I don't think the Ludology team kept up the distinction carefully enough throughout the podcast, and probably assigned a bit too much weight to it.

Randomness is not distinguished from uncertainty, wholesale, but is a particular type or instance of that broad category. Something [the price of eggs in China, say] can be "uncertain" because it is unknown [by the person interested in knowing it], or because it is patently unknowable. Presumably eggs have some relatively deterministic price in China, and my uncertainty over what that price is does not arise from the fact that the price is randomly determined, but from the fact that I simply don't have the information I need [first-hand experience or a trustworthy second-hand account] to determine it. That this particular type of uncertainty does not arise from randomness does not mean that all uncertainty is simply a lack of information. When I drop an egg, the shape of the resulting splatter is uncertain, but it is also random and fundamentally unknowable.

I've used the distinction between "unknown" and "unknowable" previously [in describing probability distributions], so I should clarify how I intend to use these terms going forward. There are random events [the roll of a die] with known and knowable probabilities that nevertheless generate unknown and unknowable ["indeterminate"] results. There are also random events that generate these indeterminate results and also have unknown and unknowable probability distributions; you don't even know what you don't know! A stupid example might be to go to a library, roll a d100, count off to that shelf, roll a d100, count off to that book, roll a d100, count off to that page, roll one last d100, count off to that word, then read off the 3rd letter. In some very broad sense [frequency of letters in the English language] there might be some knowable probabilities, but practically speaking you're ignorant.

You might catalogue all the books in the library [to see the overall probability distribution], but even then the actual books on the shelf will change day-by-day in such an unpredictable fashion that the probability distribution that defines your random choice remains basically unknowable. But, whether you can know the probability distribution that you're drawing from when you conduct some random process, the process itself still generates results that you cannot possibly know beforehand because of the randomness of the die rolls or whathaveyou. All random processes, by definition, generate indeterminate, or unknowable, results. And it is the distinction between the knowability and unknowability of results that sets randomness apart within the broad "uncertainty" category. This is only one kind of uncertainty; the other occurs in processes which generate uncertain results that are nonetheless not fundamentally unknowable.

What I think Ryan was getting at when he characterized gamers who decry particular games as "too random" as being really more concerned with "uncertainty" is the type of tenuous, unstable, tip-of-your-tongue knowledge of pseudo-predictable processes that, say, economic agents are faced with. The one thing that characterizes and drives the economy more than any other is uncertainty, not only about what government regulators will impose on economic agents but about what other economic agents themselves will do. This is uncertainty of the second order [in my little system above]; it is uncertainty about events or outcomes that are unknown but are not [theoretically] unknowable. Human beings do not generally make decisions randomly [in fact, it's a "failing" of humanity that we cannot even imitate randomness well] and the economy is driven by human decisions.

Economic activity is fraught with the particular kind of uncertainty that Ryan had in mind when he described games that are often lamented as "too random". "Players" in the economic "game" are attempting to guess the plans and future actions of their "opponents" [or "temporary emergent alliance partners", really] in order to respond preemptively to those actions to realize better gains, be better prepared to respond to market demand, or whatever. This process is characterized by a high degree, as expected, of uncertainty; marketers and strategic planners often lament "I wish I only knew ____" or "If we could only predict ____ then we could ____". But, the uncertainty here is one of ignorance and not of blindness. Fundamentally, the behavior of customers or markets [i.e. "groups of customers"] is knowable. There is one problem, and I think it's what Ryan was after in his analysis.

The problem is that large numbers of actions or decisions that generate uncertain yet knowable results can appear truly random when aggregated. You could ask an individual investor what they intend to do if stocks fall to a particular level; you could predict that behavior based on simple economic laws; you could even model the behavior of a large number of individual investors with a complex system of equations and coefficients. But, because the entire stock market is so intricate and interwoven, it is beyond the reach of practical predictive or interrogative ability to arrive at much of a useful conclusion at all about what will happen. This is the essence of the so-called "random walk hypothesis", which says that stock market behavior is best modeled by a truly random process [the hypothesis does not really say that stock prices are actually randomly determined, only that no non-random model predicts them better].

The stock price chart above looks believable enough [for some definition of "believable"]. It is entirely fictitious, however, and is essentially [though not actually, for sake of example I guess] the result of a random process: Somebody took the decimal digits of pi and plotted ups and downs based on the odds or evens in that irrational and [for practical purposes] random number sequence. Yet it has been found that similar random processes are statistically indistinguishable from actual, non-random stock market "trends". With a tip of the hat to Clarke's third law, what we find is that the result of any sufficiently complex uncertain process is indistinguishable from randomness. This is a good explanation for why someone might characterize a game that is full of player-generated [i.e. human-generated, so non-random] uncertainty as being "random"; I think it remains to be seen whether people actually make that characterization.

Roll and Move! Or, what is the role of randomness in gaming?

Randomness does one thing: Determine the outcome of a data-generating process. An appropriate analysis of randomness in gaming focuses on that definition. We find ourselves with two questions, then, in our interpretive framework: 1) What are the "data" in gaming?; 2) What are the "processes" in gaming? Answering these two questions can give us a clear structure for analyzing what randomness does when inserted into various parts and functions of a game design. Data and processes are more fundamental concepts than those we typically talk about in articles like this: mechanisms, dynamics, rules, themes, categories, interactions, etc. Think of "data" and "processes" in gaming as being analogous to assembly or machine code in contrast to higher-level programming languages. Software [a game] is written in a higher-level language [mechanisms], but depends implicitly on the underlying assembly language structure [data and processes].

Some examples of data and processes in gaming:

- A number representing a monetary value or price- A number representing a threshold or criteria to be met- A number representing a movement or action allowance- A number representing a limit or count of components or their use- A category representing the ownership or availability of a given item- A category representing the color or type or other characteristic of an item- A category representing the identity or function of an item appearing in quantity- A category representing the size or shape or other physical attribute of an item- A vector representing the physical position of an item in relation to other items- A vector representing the orientation or configuration of a given item- A vector representing the movement or future course of an item- A vector representing the influence or range of an item- An action that involves obtaining or identifying a number- An action that involves manipulating or transforming a number- An action that involves comparing or relating numbers or categories- An action that involves reference to or otherwise checking a category- An action that involves implementing a vector to move or activate an item- An action that involves modifying a vector to reposition or configure an item

The particularly bright students in class today might notice that the real analogy here is between variables and functions ["data and processes"] and programs or software [mechanisms or games], not between assembly and high-level code. You are [obviously] correct, but that metaphor doesn't have the virtue of capturing the "under the hood" / two-level feel that I'm after of dissecting games down to this detail of analysis. I'll concede. We don't typically talk about games in these terms, just like we [that is, non-programmers] don't typically talk about computer software or programming in terms of variables and subroutines, but of overall mechanisms. It is at this level, however, that randomness makes itself felt most directly on a game, and so it seems appropriate to begin our discussion of randomness at the exact point at which it contacts the data and the processes that generate or use it. To understand randomness, we need to think like game programmers.

Does it make a difference if the data in a game [the numbers, categories, vectors, configurations, etc] are determined by random algorithmic processes or if they are the [thinly] veiled or otherwise obscured result of a set of deterministic choices? Does it matter if the "program" to call up a required number in a game is sufficiently complex as to be practically indistinguishable from randomness ["check the price of eggs in China; subtract the weight of coffee left in the bag in your cupboard; then multiply by the number of players in the game"; or, more applicably, generating a number associated with the amount of cubes left on a particular tile in the last turn of a game of Dominant Species after the final action selection and activation round is through... recall that nothing is random after the initial setup of each turn] or is truly random? And if it does matter, how so? What is the effect of randomness, included or excluded, on how a game plays?

I think one of the larger effects of randomness in general is to shift the focus of the game from player-vs-player to player-vs-game. There are, essentially, only about 2 or 3 different possible ways to obtain a piece of data necessary to play a game; it is either 1) Randomly determined by some game process [roll a die]; 2) Deterministically generated by the actions of the players [a choice]; 3) Predetermined by the structure of the game [a preset value or a value that changes by phase or other passive function]. #3 can be ignored for our purposes, because the heart of our discussion is uncertainty and a preset table of values based on criteria which exist in the game at the time represents total certainty. We are left with uncertainty that is resolved by observing player action or by resolving a random process. It is not that randomness removes or prevents player interaction; it is that it reduces its dimensionality.

Consider a roll-and-move "toy game" with a few pawns for each player that race around a track and can knock each other off by exact movement to convergence, or even an actual roll-and-move game like Pachisi or Backgammon. But, let's limit ourselves to such games that are actually games [and not like Snakes and Ladders or Game of Goose which have no player choice in response to the die roll and are literally "roll and move" pastimes]. Even when the available movement is determined by a die roll, players still have a choice of which pawn to move and may choose [as available per the die roll] to interact with each other by direct conflict [knocking a pawn off the board], by blocking / limiting [tying up a point or space], or by racing / applying game tempo pressure [moving ahead more quickly toward the end of the game, probably at higher risk, by passing up the potential to set up knocking or blocking moves].

What might happen if we choose to substitute the random process [a die roll] generating the "movement allowance" "data" for a non-random, yet still uncertainty-laden, process dependent on player choice? Let's say that our game was based around a single die roll previously; now let's give each player a set of tokens numbered 1 through 6 from which they may freely choose their movement points each turn. Let's add the wrinkle that they must use all of the six tokens one time each before they may reuse / refresh their supply of possible movement values. The overall distribution of movement speeds by game's end will be roughly the same [namely, uniform] in either the original "roll and move" game or in our new "choose your own adventure" game. Additionally, all of the old strategies [knocking, blocking, racing, etc] will essentially still be available [racing / risk is the most vulnerable, but it was also the least interactive].

But what will have changed? There will now be a new element / dimension of your opposition's strategy and tactical responses for you to consider when making a move. Previously, if you left yourself potentially open for attack, the question was "If they are able to, will they knock me off?" Now, the question becomes "Seeing that they are able to, will they knock me off?" The reason the latter has greater dimensionality has to do with the opportunity cost function involved in player choice under either scenario. If your opponent needs a 5 to knock your piece off, and they roll a 5, their decision whether to knock you away depends on what else they can do with that roll of a 5. If, however, they are free to choose among any of their remaining movement numbers [let's say 1, 4, and 5] and 5 is among them, their decision depends not only on what else they could do with a move of 5, but a move of 4, or of 1, or of whatever else they are able to choose.

Suppose if you leave yourself open for attack that there is nothing even remotely better for your opponent to do with a movement rate of 5; if that is their only choice, they will with 100% certainty choose to knock your piece. Under the die-rolling scenario, your decision of whether to move yourself into the position of being potentially knocked off the board does not depend on what you expect the other player to do at all, but on whether you are willing to take the risk that the game [effectively] knocks you away [with your opponent serving merely as the vicar of the cruel winds of fate]. You will weigh the possible gains of that move against the probabilistically weighted cost of having the piece knocked, and make your choice. If, however, we are working under the scenario where the other player may decide either to use a 5 to knock you or to use another available number to do something else, things will be different.

In the non-random case, your decision depends on your expectation of your opponent's evaluation of the 5 move against the potentially "better" uses of other movement values available to them. Simply because the data point "number of spaces your opponent can move" will be determined by a non-random choice rather than a random process, there now exists a broader range of possible moves over which you must anticipate and prepare for potential responses by your opponent. If you are "surprised" by what happens on your opponent's turn, it will not be surprise that a 5 came up on the die and you got knocked [because it was the only reasonable action] but because your opponent evaluated the game position differently from you and chose to either knock you away or not based on that evaluation. Your task is not merely to compute expected values, but to judge and assign subjective probabilities themselves to the particular responses possible by your opponent.

In short, the uncertainty and the richness of opportunity cost decisions and positional evaluations is often greater in games where more data is determined by player choice than by random outcomes. This is neither inherently bad nor inherently good, and is itself a trade-off. Games that have less randomness must generally be more mechanically complex than games that have more randomness, or else risk dominant strategies; if you could choose your movement value completely freely in our toy game above, you'd probably always choose the highest possible value. Only the complex number-cycling rule added to the luckless game keeps the game playable, whereas the die-rolling game needs no such overhead. More complex games tend to be more chaotic, and this is only amplified when the dimensionality of uncertainty is higher [as it generally is in games with more player choices]. Is the added richness of decision evaluation worth this cost? Who knows!

The boys here have made a few changes to the classic luckless game of Chess. But, the substantive nature of the change really isn't that they've added die-rolling, but that they've added data [as an aside, if they merely wanted Chess with die-rolling, they could have played its ancestor Chaturanga]. The essence of what has been added is data about the board and the pieces and their interaction: What pieces can move first? How to pieces attack each other? What if anything does the terrain of the board do to pieces? These are concerns that require very very little data in Chess: Players take turns [Data: "1" or "2"]; combat is quick and decisive [Data: "1" or "0"]; terrain consists of black-vs-white for the bishops and home-rows for pawn promotion [Data: "B" or "W"; "Home" or "Not"; or just "1" or "0" again]. As true thematic gamers, however, Jason and Marcus want to know more about the state of the game. This requires a finer level of detail and more things to collect data about.

Why did they choose to generate this new data randomly? It could be just that, as role-players, they had a bunch of nifty polyhedral dice that they couldn't stand seeing neglected on the shelf. That's a simplification [even abstracted out of our fantasy world of the Foxtrot comic strip] and the real reason probably isn't as silly. The reason I think a lot of game designers resort to randomness to generate data is that they are attempting to strike a particular balance between the three competing factors of uncertainty, chaos, and complexity that is difficult to achieve in a game entirely driven by player decisions. Because these three factors tend to be interdependent, there is a bit of a [self-referential] butterfly-effect to increasing any one of the three. The minute you add additional complexity to a game, you increase the amount of uncertainty [due to player choice or random chance--it doesn't matter], and that in turn increases the chaotic dispersion of outcomes.

That broader set of possible outcomes itself increases the decision complexity [apart from the rules / mechanical complexity] and difficulty of "ply analysis". In short, the resultant difficulty of learning to play the game [much less learning to play it well] and to make reasonable predictions concerning your opponent's moves increases exponentially [I believe] because of the tri-fold sensitivity of uncertainty, chaos, and complexity to each other. There is a tendency, I find, for games without any chance elements to fall victim to one of two patterns of design that don't suit most gamers: either the game 1) is too simplistic to be consistently interesting [it risks solution]; or 2) is too complex to be enjoyable without intense study [it resists learning]. The problem is that, from a simple germ of an idea for a luckless game, any significant increase in "bulk" will tend to result in a momentous preponderance of ever-growing uncertainty, complexity, and chaos. Getting a luckless game to be accessibly deep is incredibly difficult because the system has no checks or balances or limits.

Randomness effectively cuts short the look-ahead tree of decision-making. There are fewer possible counter-moves to consider the ramifications of, because there are fewer things which your opponent can control in the game. At a certain point, you must resort to calculating the probabilities of particular outcomes, which [although often unintuitive] are relatively easy to work through and use in decision-making. Even if you're not the analytical type, there's a certain comfort level attached to a decision which will largely be met by a random response as opposed to one that will be met by the freely chosen response of your opponent. To run into "bad luck" is one thing; even if your decision was demonstrably "wrong" mathematically / probabilistically, you can claim to have been "taking a chance". To fall into a blunderous oversight like Marcus' neglect to ready his resurrection spell is different; you rightfully feel embarrassed and a bit silly, and you have no one but yourself to blame. That was the one piece of data he had to take responsibility to generate, and he screwed up!

Does this all mean that games with random elements are necessarily lighter games? Well, not if phrased in those exact terms, no. But if we appropriately apply ceteris paribus conditions, then yes. Absolutely. Games with random elements are, in fact, necessarily lighter [because the look-ahead is shorter] than they would have been had the random data been generated by a player-driven process instead. [The "ceteris paribus" condition, if you're not familiar with the term, is that we are comparing games to themselves / alternative default assumptions, not to other games... Jason and Marcus' D&D Chess is still a heavier game than Tic Tac Toe, even though the former is random and the latter is not.] This doesn't mean that games with randomness are all light games either. There is a particular type of depth that deals with understanding and intuiting probability structures, and it is often extremely difficult to play luck-driven games well, but the broad concept of randomness / probability remains more predictable than player-driven choice [because humans are irrational creatures].

The essential value of randomness to game design is that randomness is manageable whereas players are not. Or, at least, players are a particularly intractable admixture of jackasses, smartasses, dumbassess, wiseasses, and other asses yet to be assessed. The winds of fate are cruel and capricious, but they are not crafty and do not conspire against you. We tend to personify "good luck" [Lady Luck, innumerable gods and goddesses, etc], but general bad luck doesn't seem to anthropomorphized as frequently. I think, perhaps, this is because we instinctively feel that misfortune that could be attributed to humanity is much more malicious and ill-intentioned in character than simply drawing the short straw. Human representations of bad events are given such traits as vengeance, fury, cruelty, and so on. This carries over, of course, into gaming. Even beyond the typical social meta-gaming aspects of good-natured in-fighting and non-productive revenge-seeking, human actions are subject to a type of caprice that dice just aren't. After all, they have no memory!

If some piece of data or some process is essential to the proper functioning of a game, it is dangerous as a designer to leave it up to the players to generate that data or process. This can be a particularly compelling design move, no doubt, but it is not one that should be taken lightly. There is nothing inherently wrong with leaving a critical bit of uncertainty in the game data up to the roll of a die or the turn of a card. In fact, I believe it is sometimes the appropriate design choice in order to maintain the desired level of depth appropriate to the game and its audience. There are games that break in "mixed company" [analytical vs casual players, experienced vs rookie players, etc] because there is not enough randomness to prevent a player with a significantly better understanding of the depths of the game from leveraging that knowledge to secure the win. Often this is fine, even desirable; sometimes it is clearly not. So, if these are some of the roles randomness can play in a game, when is it appropriate to design in random elements?

Designers tend to introduce randomness into a game as an easy, and easily manageable, method for creating numerical data that needs to have a degree of uncertainty [die rolls for hit success or attack damage; price or price movements of a commodity; etc]. Another common place for randomness to occur is in the generation of qualitative information such as the availability of assets [power plants, plantations, plasma missiles] or the content of a player's asset holdings [drawing or being dealt a hand of cards; receiving resources based on a die roll; etc]. One other important implementation of randomness often occurs in the setup or procession [phase changes, etc] of factors that determine the prevailing environment in which a game will be played [what buildings will be available; how will resources be distributed at the beginning of the game; what will the game terrain look like; etc]. In the podcast, Geoff used the terms "input randomness" and "output randomness" to distinguish between possible applications of randomness within a game design.

I think these are fairly good terms, but I'd like to add one more category and draw the distinction a bit differently:

Random outcomes occur when a game process has an uncertain effect on the state of the game, which will be resolved by a random mechanism rather than by player choice [Geoff's "output randomness"]. All of the most obvious examples of randomness in gaming, including roll-and-move as the exemplar, fall into this category.

Random opportunity occurs when game players are collectively faced with an available set of actions or effects which are uncertain until revealed and are determined randomly [Geoff's "input randomness"]. Players may or may not have equal ability to pursue the opportunity presented, but their access to it is unrestricted.

Random empowerment occurs when the available opportunities in the game are presented differently to different players, or when players do not have equal access to every possible action, and when this asymmetry is determined randomly. This is a form of "input randomness" and "random opportunity", but worth separating.

[This basic structure is something I've used for awhile; my very first post in this blog touched on them in #7 and 8.]

These three terms in particular are useful [or distracting, I suppose, depending on your proclivity] because they are familiar from a field of philosophy more relevant to most of us than Geoff's mechanical-mathematical metaphor of inputs and outputs: namely that of political or social justice, fairness, and equality. They are also useful because this association emphasizes the result of including randomness in a game rather than the mere nature of it. Randomness, of these varying types, tends to introduce unforeseeable inequities of varying severity into a game. When only outcomes differ [from identical process inputs, as they do in an "output randomness" situation], the process may be said to be unfortunate, unkind, unfair, and perhaps even unjust. When the opportunities themselves also differ ["input randomness"], but the outcomes follow deterministically [or even randomly, really], the process may still be unkind, but would probably not be characterized as unjust or unfair. When the empowerment, in particular, to take advantage of or gain access to available opportunities differs, the process is probably somewhere in between.

In Entdecker, as an example, a random process determines each player's income for their turn, from 2 to 5 gold on a 4-segment spinner. Even though there is no systematic bias [because both opportunity and empowerment remain equal for all players], the process still generates inequality of incomes and feels unfair.

In Löwenherz, as a counter-example, a random process determines the availability of gold income for all players on a turn. The value, from 4 to 8, changes each turn, and the more players that choose the gold action on a turn the less they receive individually. Although the low income card may come at a particularly inopportune moment for you, you are not being treated unfairly.

In Pfeffersäcke, a middle-of-the-road case exists for randomly-determined income generation. Players are dealt discs randomly with values ranging from 2 to 8, which determine the cities they have control over "opening" for trade. Being able to open a higher value city means you determine when it enters into the game and have a greater ability to get in on its high income before other players can. You still have to work at it, so this feels only partly unfair.

Using our prior analysis of player-based vs game-based interaction, it seems to me these different uses of randomness increase along the dimension of player interactivity in roughly the same order as they do in perceived fairness. At one extreme is the system in which the success of your actions or growth of your resources is not a matter of choice at all, but the result [output] of a random event; this feels very non-interactive. Along the way toward total player-driven interactivity, we progress through systems in which a considerable portion of your fate is determined randomly by the game and not by your decisions [you have low or random empowerment], and systems in which the only thing holding you back is the interaction between your and your opponents' responses to randomly arising opportunities. There is greater player agency, unsurprisingly [but I also think unobviously], in games with only random opportunity instead of random outcomes. I think, in part, this distinction can help to make sense of the ever-controversial Ameritrash vs Eurogame / "thematic" vs "strategic" categorizations and explain both why they are and what they mean.

To Dice or Not To Dice? Or, wherefore art thou, oh Rolleo?

One of the prevailing and most often cited differences between Ameritrash and Eurogames is not just the use of more randomness in AT titles, but the use of particular types of randomness designed into each sort of game. It is by no means a rule without exception, but in general "Ameritrash" games tend to contain more randomness in the generation of outcomes than of opportunities, more "output" than "input" randomness; contrarily, "Euro style" games [that include randomness at all] tend to contain randomness of a different sort, primarily concerned with the generation of random opportunity. Empowerment is, again, a middling case, used by both Euro and AT games [I think perhaps one distinguishing sub-categorization might be the number of ways in which randomly distributed empowerments can be deployed in a game, with Euro games tending to have more possible uses for your random power alottment]. You will not tend to find "rolling for damage" or "skill checks" or random movement in Euro games; similarly, you will not generally find complicated random resource distributions such as Yspahan's tower or Assyria's food card display or Age Of Steam's cube production in an Ameritrash title.

I believe a large part of the rationale for these observed preference in sub-cultures of gaming, as well as for the "thematic" / "narrative" alternative [and sterile] description for the "Ameritrash" genre, has to do with the concept of agency: how it interacts with story-telling and how various types of randomness create or limit it. If a game is intended to convey a "story", I believe there is a counter-intuitive need for player's in the game to have low agency, which as we've discussed already necessitates greater "output randomness". This has to do with story as a literary device. For all of the character development and birds-eye, action-driven writing that goes into telling a good story, it seems to me that the plots of most great stories involve the protagonists playing very passive roles and being put into situations where they have low agency. If something doesn't "happen to" the protagonist, if there is no "ordeal" they must go through, if nothing with a "will of its own" gets in their way, then the story simply doesn't have the same dramatic appeal. Stories all but require "outcomes" that are not the fortuitous result of being in the right place at the right time [opportunity] or of having just the right abilities or assets to tackle a situation, but the unpredictable result of something that "goes wrong" or otherwise behaves in an unforeseen way.

Overcoming unforeseen obstacles and dealing with unintended consequences are the making of all of our heroes. Heroes don't have control over everything; they have relatively low agency to change the "way things are", despite their ability to adapt and overcome and perform great feats of strength or fortitude. BGG's resident solo gaming blogger, Patrick Carroll, once drew the distinction between "god games" and "hero games", categorizing "hero games" as those with more "hidden information and chance" and "god games" as being more "deterministic". I think he got this exactly right, although I would go one step further and clarify that a "hero game" is one in which the outcomes [in particular] of your decisions are more uncertain or random, where there is more "output randomness". I think these are the feelings and stories that Ameritrashers are trying to experience when they play a "thematic" or "immersive" game, and what they mean when they say [or at least BGG says] that these games focus on creating a "dramatic narrative". It isn't just that Ameritrashers like throwing around buckets'o'dice, but that the particular randomness associated with using such mechanisms to generate random outcomes helps create stories.

In contrast, Eurogames tend to provide greater player agency, because the experience they are intended to create is one of world manipulation [at least on a microcosm-ic level] and self-actualization. Even the player avatars in your stereotypical Eurogame theme tend to have greater real-world agency than the typical AT character: Players become wealthy aristocrats, powerful politicians, kings and emperors, factory managers, corporate executives, and so on. Themes and characters associated with struggle and low agency, as in Agricola or Antics!, are by no means the norm. Very few AT games, in contrast, focus on the Euro tropes of "building", "managing", "control", or "development". These represent agency, and the addition of high levels of randomness associated with the outcomes of game processes [as is desirable in an AT title] would serve to reduce player agency and destroy the "god-like" role of player-as-overseer. When random outcomes are used successfully in Euro style games, it is always in a very specific context to model something that is clearly beyond the limits of the particular type of agency being assumed by players in the game; it is rarely done merely to introduce obstacles for players. Obstacles in Euro designs arise from non-random factors such as complexity or logistics or efficiency.

How and why does randomness ever get into a game design in the first place? A lot of designers seem to follow the pointy-haired-boss moel and simply insert random features as a way of creating the impression of value to a particular demographic. Designers, whether working in the Ameritrash or Euro or any other genre, need to really appreciate the different types of randomness and the impact they have on a game apart from their mere immediate mechanical implementation. I think the really good designers out there are better at doing this [choosing the right form of randomness, if any, for their games] than we generally give them credit for. Rather than looking at the impact of randomness on a game or the way in which it shapes a player's immersion into the system, we tend to just look at the sheer amount of uncertainty that a particular random mechanism creates. I think that the core misunderstanding of randomness by gamers, rather than being Ryan's "they really mean just that the game is full of uncertainty", is that many gamers tend to view randomness as an artifact or an ornamentation of a design rather than as a structural architectural feature upon which the game design is built.

Randomness, as we've already discussed, is a very low-level game design feature; it is a foundation rather than a decorative element. It tends to be glaringly obvious, however, when a game process is handled randomly [the most iconic symbols of gaming, after all, are cards and dice], so we think that it is the superficial, surface-level portion of the game and that all of the depths of the design lie beneath it. This simply isn't the case. Well-designed games, when they include randomness, are built around the underlying randomly-generated data. The randomness in such games exists not only to provide simple uncertainty, but to create particular types of decision-making situations and to control the numerical data of the game in a specific way. Game mechanisms exist merely to manipulate the various data [mostly numeric] of the game; it is in the interaction of that data that the game itself really subsists. Randomness serves to create particular genres of data interaction. Surprisingly, it can do this with a degree of uncertainty while maintaining a greater level of predictability and control than can many systems relying on players to manipulate the data directly.

Hallmarks of good implementation of randomness in a design include openness, intentionality, and sensitivity. Openness has to do with the susceptibility of the random processes to appropriate player analysis. Die rolls are familiar and easy to interpret or predict, so it is no surprise that they continue to be popular methods of generating data randomly. It is not satisfying to play a game in which a particular piece of relevant game data will be determined randomly according to a probability distribution that is obscured or inscrutable or simply too complex to be grokked. Particularly helpful are games like Settlers or Dungeon Petz that provide summaries to assist players in interpreting the possible and likely results of random processes. I think the combat mechanism in Eclipse serves as a recent standout in the "openness" of its random resolution. It is extraordinarily clear how the process works, what the probabilities are, and how every modifier or buff affects the relevant parameters. Related to openness, I think, is the concept of designer intention. If it is not clear from playing the game why the designer included a random element or what the random process is supposed to simulate [or even do] in the game, it will also often be the case that the random process is overwrought and too complicated for its own good... as if the designer just gave up and left everything up to dice, the easy fall-back solution.

One evidence of strong designer intentionality in including randomness is in the number of systems in the game that use random processes and in the number of different types of processes that are used. Well-designed games, built to include randomness for very specific purposes, use only as much randomness as necessary and each random process usually has a unique and appropriate resolution method. Finally, another evidence that the designer has thought about the impact randomness will have on the game is that the sensitivity of game outcomes to the varying data of random processes is appropriate to the length and depth of the game. It is not merely that short games can have more randomness and long games should have less, but that long games with significant player investment and decision-making should not generally have randomness that can overwhelmingly determine the outcome of the game. Inherent in randomness is the concept of variability of outcomes; if one of the possible outcomes, however rare, can have such a dramatic impact on the game that it all but entirely determines the eventual winner, it ultimately doesn't matter how well controlled or designed the rest of the random processes are. Contrarily, if the randomness in a game has possible effects appropriate to the game's design, there can be a very large amount of randomness even in a very long game and the game can still be a satisfying experience. This doesn't even mean that randomness must always be insignificant; it simply means that randomness should be appropriately significant for the amount of risk, preparation, and potential reward it offers.

Editor's Note: Apparently there is a character limit in blog posts? The blog continues and concludes below in the first comment.

Suddenly a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Caveat: This review was written over two years' time. Everything up to the "Topology + Logistics" section was written a long time ago. I have left it mostly as is, with only minor revisions.

Additionally, the modern section was written mostly at 3:00-4:00 in the morning after feeding a 6-week old baby, and the very last bit was written this morning with him in my arms screaming in my ears.

Vouchsafe me any inconsistencies or ambiguities due to either of these causes.

Errors, syntactical and rhetorical, have surely been made as well; point them out.

A recent Ludology episode had Ryan Sturm making the claim that "Caylus is the most important game of the last 10 years". I'm not prepared to debate that, but I want to argue this:

Thesis [strong form]: Roads & Boats is the most important, most pivotal, and most interesting game in the entire history of modern resource-management Euro games.

In fact, it is hard to find a more traceable lineage of games except in instances where a clear series is identifiable [e.g. the 18xx series, __-oretto games]. While those of us who like to talk about games a lot throw around terms and phrases like “innovative mechanisms,” “mixes old ideas together in new and interesting ways,” or “creates a new genre,” these terms and phrases rarely stick. In the case of Roads & Boats, they are all true. I will argue, perhaps unprovably or even demonstrably false, that the existence of the genres of “Worker Placement”, “Cube Pushing”, and “Resource Management” as we know them now is due to the genius of Jeroen Doumen and Joris Wiersinga's seminal creation.

Overview

Roads & Boats is a large and a long game. It is also among the most mechanically pure and designedly succinct games I have encountered. There is essentially only one mechanism in the game, and the game title gives it away: Move things, by road or by boat, from Point A to Point B, where they will change into something else that you can move from Point B to Point C, and so on. The more astute among you might catch a hint in that description of the underlying, unifying theme of the game: Movement and exchange. In short, logistics: What to produce and where, what to process and where, how and when to best move raw materials to processing centers--these are the puzzles the game provides.

In the game, this takes the form of three unique elements: producers, goods, and transporters. Each producer, all 20 or so different types of them, will provide output each turn of the game in the form of goods. Goods, in turn, take almost as many different forms, from raw materials [clay, wood, fuel, gold, iron, &cetera] to processed or semi-processed materials [stone, lumber, paper, coins, &cetera] to finished goods [stock certificates, new trucks and ships and other transporters, bricks toward construction of the wonder, &cetera]. [I have written out “&cetera” in each category, because the expansion, by that name, adds about 50% more stuff in each category.]

Raw-material producers simply provide their output for free; other producers require an input good, in the form of a raw or semi-processed material from a different producer, before providing a processed or finished good. So, you may have the woodcutter or the clay pit piling up fallen trees and lumps of misshapen clay over in one area of the map, and the sawmill and brick factory sitting idle waiting for tree limbs and clay to come in to be transformed into something more usable. You also have those anxious folks at the paper mill, the mint, or the wagon factory waiting for their respective inputs. Stuff in one place needs to get to somewhere else, and here's where you, the player, come in!

In Roads & Boats, you as a player neither own goods nor the means to produce or refine those goods. All you have to your name is a transporter fleet. Your various transporters are how you will pick up output goods from one producer and deliver them as inputs to another, then turn around and take those outputs to yet another producer, and so on. Any goods not held on one of your transporters are fair game for other players to swoop in and pick up, and any surfeit input goods to one of the secondary producers in the game [due to two or more players bringing raw materials in for refining] will just have to sit on the truck 'til next turn while the factory services that no good lout that got there first.

Gameplay

Surprisingly, for such a long and involved game, there are extraordinarily few rules and even fewer rules exceptions or ambiguities. Every turn, all the factories and producers will supply output goods if they have the requisite inputs [some require no input]. After that, you will be able to load up goods on your transporters if you have them positioned on the tiles with the goods [each transporter can hold a certain amount of goods]. Then, you will move your transporters along the roads and rivers [each can move a certain number of spaces]. Finally, you will use the goods on your transporters to construct new buildings so that in future turns you can refine even further your finished goods [eventually for points!].

It is incredibly intuitive, and hearkens back to something simple like playing with Tonka trucks as a kid. If the game had pieces sufficiently elaborate enough, it would almost literally require no rules. There are a few wrinkles to learn, such as the process for moving goods on water [you've got to dock and load the boats!], the ability to build walls and additional roads, and the last big element of the game... the construction of the wonder, which serves as both a time-keeper and a way to earn points. All of the real meat of the game is contained on the player aid card, which lays out all of the production functions [inputs -> outputs] and carrying capacities / distances of your various types of transporters.

So, what is the meat of the game? Simply put, it is finding the quickest way to navigate the twisty, turny production functions to get from a few measly sticks and bricks to a hoard of gleaming coins and a monument that celebrates your excellent logistical skills. Of the dozen or so goods in the game, only 3 earn you any points. These 3 “wealth” goods are related, and can be progressively refined into each other, such that you double your score by reaching the 2nd level and triple it by reaching the 3rd. 2 gold is worth 20pts alone [10pts each], but you can convert 2 gold -> 1 coin = 40pts, or, in turn, 2 coins -> 1 stock = 120 pts. 4 gold [= 40pts] -> 2 coins [= 80pts—doubled] -> 1 stock [= 120 pts—tripled].

The only other way to get points [outside of &cetera] is to build in the wonder, which is kind of an upside-down pyramid shape of layered rows of bricks. Each brick you build in a row costs you 1 of any good [2 later], and the most points you can get per row is 10pts [you typically have to share these 10pts with other players]. So, if you're keeping score as you follow along, you'll note that a row in the wonder is worth as much as one piece of gold, but there's no way to “double” a wonder row. These two point sources [wealth and wonder points] are in conflict with one another, both in terms of resource needs [you can't put resources into refining gold if you're making bricks out of them!] and game timing.

Suffice to say that a player who is throwing a bunch of bricks into the wonder is going to really make life difficult for a player [maybe themselves!] who is hoping to convert a bunch of gold into coins and eventually into stock certificates. I will speak in much greater detail about the wonder later, but it's important to know now [before we start comparing games] that there are two ways to earn points in the game—refine resources [gold -> coins -> stock] and consume resources [throw it all into the wonder]—and that the two ways of earning points are in conflict both in terms of individual player resource use and in terms of inter-player relationships through game timing and majority scoring.

In the game, your crucial victory-related decisions come down to whether to focus your infrastructure and logistical network on amassing wealth or on accomplishing wonders of architecture. Any winning strategy will consist of elements of both, but the two goals are in tension, and require significantly different types of infrastructure which are also in tension should you try to build both simultaneously. The key to winning is creating an infrastructure that supports one of these goals very well and has the amicable by-product of creating ancillary pathways and back-alleys for the other. Lest you think there are “only two” strategies [wealth or wonder], let's start to talk about strategy in the game.

Strategy

To get to stock certificates, you have to bring raw materials through a grand total of 6 transformations. First, you need lumber and stones to build the mines that provide raw gold. To get lumber, you first must get tree trunks, from the Woodcutter producer. You bring the trunks to the Sawmill and get your sticks. To get stones to build, you either need a Quarry, or some raw clay to put into the Stone Factory. After you've got the Mine, you'll start pulling out gold. To get coins, you need gold and fuel. Fuel can come from an Oil Rig, but you have to research that [takes geese and paper; paper takes wood], or from a Coal Burner [put in wood, any kind, take out fuel]. Finally, to get stock, you need coins and paper.

So, trunks to sticks and clay to bricks [two transformations, four buildings], then you can build a Mine and get some gold. Then, you need either geese+paper for the Oil Rig [just to get the right to build it; you still need more sticks and bricks to actually make the thing] or a Coal Burner to throw wood into; either way, this is one more building and transformation [wood->paper, or wood->fuel]. Take the gold and the fuel, throw them in the Mint, and you get some shiny coins [yet another building and transformation]. Finally, you take some leftover paper [transformation] and write out a promissory note against your wealth [coins] to get your first stock certificate [final transformation and building].

To sum it up, that's 7 or 8 buildings [Woodcutter, Sawmill, Clay Pit + Stone Factory or just Quarry, Oil Rig or Coal Burner, Mint, Stock Exchange, and a Paper Mill—needed for the stock certificate transformation, at least, and also possibly for the Oil Rig research if you go that route] at a bare minimum [usually you'll have multiples of some, or both of one step—Oil Rig AND Coal Burner, for instance—to maximize output of a crucial resource]. Each building has a construction cost in addition to its turn-by-turn resource input demands for its production function. This is also a minimum of 6 or 7 transformations / productions to get from sticks and stones to stocks, the ultimate status symbol.

“So what?”, you may be asking. The “so what” is that the game time is limited to a set number of turns, and can be shortened [but never lengthened]. Each turn only provides you with one transformation as you follow each embodied resource through the supply chain. That is, you can't transform a bunch of gold to coins and those same coins to stock on one turn, though you can further transform previously transformed gold—in the form of coins, presently—to stock while you're in the middle of transforming different pieces of gold into new coins, to be transformed themselves, in turn, into stocks later. Your goal is to shove embodied resources through subsequent refinement steps as fast as you can manage.

To do this effectively, you need to stack the different stages of production on top of each other as efficiently as possible. Once you've got some coins and are shipping them off to the Stock Exchange, you can't just forget about your Mint; you need to immediately gear up production for additional coins. This requires you to work all the way back through the supply chain on every turn to maximize the mobility of your goods to get everything to where it needs to be on time. And, you need to do this simultaneously at all levels of the supply chain. You will have, at any given time, goods in every phase of production on your transporters, and the puzzle is to get all of them where they need to go ASAP.

Strategy-wise, the game space positively explodes as the game progresses. You start with maybe two or three producers, a simple little network of donkeys and roads, casually bringing trunks from the forest to the Sawmill for refining. About a third of the way through, you're to the point where you begin to wonder if your feeble brain can even handle the amount of information you are supposed to be processing. By the end, you will have a dozen or so producers, each with goods piling up that need to go to at least two different places each, and half a dozen or more transporters with which to attempt the job. Leaving aside the actual logistics, the sheer math is scary. “Snowball” is an understatement.

To make it all work, you have to plan out a leverageable spatial layout for the producer network you'll be using and then make efficient use of—surprise!—roads and boats to get the goods physically from one producer to the next in their chain. There are a number of ways to do this, but it goes back to the basic wealth vs. wonder dilemma: you can only contribute to the wonder in one hex [we haven't even talked about the board yet!], whereas a wealth production chain requires at least 6. A heavy wonder builder will create networks that can rapidly push goods back to that one home hex; a heavy wealth builder will create networks that can efficiently move goods through a mostly linear chain. Clump vs chain.

Somewhere along the way, you'll find out that you need to do everything if you want to stay competitive. The key is to leverage your network so that one transporter can do the work of two, or more, picking up goods from one place and simultaneously delivering them to two separate refining facilities in one turn [drop one off, move again, drop the other off]—or the reverse, taking goods from two places to the one place they need to go [pick up, move, pick up, move], or even some combination of the two. You have a second, auxiliary choice to make here; you can build similar producers close together, or you can upgrade your transporters to move further and carry more, or some combination.

Winning

Wealth or wonder? The answer is “Both”, but to what extent? Here's where things get interesting. You should already have some idea that the process of getting the big point-scoring wealth goods in the game [stocks] is lengthy and difficult. I'll tell you now, because it's beginning to be relevant and meaningful, but there are at most 33 turns in the game. I don't know what the theoretical minimum is, but common knowledge [and personal experience] seems to be that you'll be making your first stock [if you're lucky] somewhere around turn 25-28. It would not be uncommon for a beginner to not make a single stock. Even one is an accomplishment. Multiple stocks is probably a game-winning blow.

“What about the wonder?” Here's what: It shortens the game and requires no transformation of goods through the supply chain. Why is this important [and genius, I think]? As an example, in the 2p game, if one player builds to the wonder uncontested [the other player does not build at all], they can rack up a total of 120pts [in games of higher player counts, there are slightly more wonder points to go around]—exactly as much as a stock—before the game ends. The wonder can shorten the game if the players build it very quickly, perhaps by as much as 4 or 5 turns or more. This can be the difference, easily, in the wonder-builder's opponent getting to convert their coins to that stock, or even their gold to coins.

What did I say earlier, that the wonder is both a source of points and a time-keeper? Not to get into too much detail, but the way this works is that there are 33 “neutral” bricks for the wonder; one goes on each turn, in addition to any player bricks. There are spaces on the wonder marked with a player count [like the turn track in Genoa, Age of Steam, et al] that will not be reached before the neutral bricks run out if no players build to the wonder, but might be reached if the players contribute heavily. Depending on exactly how many bricks the players between them build, the game can go the full 33 turns, or can be shortened considerably [if 2p each build just 1 brick per turn, the game will last only 21 turns].

Wonder construction requires no special care in daisy chaining production centers together aside from getting as many resources as possible to your home hex [where the wonder may be built] each turn. This can be intentional or unintentional, but is [as most things in the game] usually a sort of mix. If your network starts to look ugly, you might want to consider switching gears and try to end the game early before your more efficient opponent gets his engine running and can start churning out stock certificates. If you have excess resources for your beautifully planned supply chain, and plenty of time to run it through a few cycles, you can drop them off at the wonder for additional points.

Winning the game depends heavily on controlling and predicting exactly how long the game will last and making sure that your production goals and capabilities are aligned accordingly. If you get in a tight spot, and are on the high-end of the turn 25-28 range for getting your first stock [it's certainly possible not to get a stock until turn 30 or higher], you either need to have a backup plan in place to churn out points from the wonder or be watching to make sure your opponent isn't going to bum-rush you into an end-game that comes out of the blue when you weren't expecting it, long before your sloppy supply chain job can materialize into anything even remotely resembling wealth or the pursuit of happiness.

Why the wonder is genius is that it provides a substantive way for a player falling behind in the stock race to put pressure on the leaders of that race, without resorting to awkward catch-up or slow-down mechanisms that are so often used in newer games to prevent “runaway leaders”. The wonder is not a “gimme”; a player who ignores wealth cannot win with the wonder alone. What the wonder serves as is instead a sort of antitrust / regulatory compliance board. If everyone is in the competitive hunt, it can be ignored; if a clear leader begins to emerge, the less efficient player can start pushing the wonder and the leader will have to respond, cutting into their efficiency, or risk an early game end and no wonder points.

Topology + Logistics

One of the most interesting features of Roads & Boats is the difficulty of planning your network of roads, which you physically draw on the board in the manner of something like Crayon Rails or Dampfross, so as to make the most logistical success from your limited transport fleet. Every tile on the board can only hold one production building, so to navigate your way through the extraordinarily long production chains previously described, you'll have to literally navigate your transport fleet through a system of interconnected stops. Traditionally, in gaming, we'd call this “route-planning” or “network-building”; in the larger world, we call this topology, the mathematical study of the shape of systems.

Fair warning: I am not a topologist. I do know, at least, that the discipline began with Euler's exposition of the famous “Seven Bridges of Konigsberg” problem. There are seven bridges in the city that connect two large islands and the two banks of the mainland on either side of a widely forked river in which the islands sit. The task, as defined by Euler, is to define a path through the city such that every bridge is crossed once and only once. It turns out, due to the specific configuration of islands and bridges, that this feat is both practically and [this was Euler's spark that birthed the field] mathematically provably impossible. Go ahead and prove it to yourself by attempting to trace such a path on the map below.

From Euler's inspiration, a massively important mathematic discipline was built up that presently is applied in things as diverse as protein folding, cosmological physics, and computer network design. In no small part, the reason the Internet works as well as it does is traceable to Euler. For our purposes, the aspects of topology that are most interesting are the simplest, and the ones closest to Euler's original problem [thank God, since I don't understand competing space-time structures]. In basic topologies like this, there are “nodes” [islands] and “links” [bridges], and various paths that can be traced. “Nodes” and “links” are also called “vertices” and “edges” because a topological graph may be conceived of as a polygon.

One can imagine an infinite number of different, and increasingly complex, possible configurations of nodes and links [islands and bridge]. What if there were a bunch of islands in a row and we built bridges between each successive pair? What if we also made a massive bridge at the end of the row that went back to the very first island? What if we built a single long bridge alongside the row of islands, like a highway, and had “exits” so we could stop off at whatever destination we liked? What if we worked for the government and had the bright idea to “create jobs” by contracting bridges to be built between every possible pair of islands, adjacent or not? These questions represent different topological graphs.

Each possible system of bridges we might build between our imagined islands has its own unique topological structure, and its own unique efficiencies for path-tracing. Take a look at the “ring” and the “star” shapes. If the goal is to be able to move quickly [as few “bridge crossings” as possible] through every one of the nodes, the “ring” is the clear winner; we can start at any node and travel through all of the others in only 5 crossings. To accomplish the same task under the “star” structure, we'd need at least 8 crossings [if we started at any of the outer nodes], and maybe as many as 9 [if we started at the central node]. This doesn't mean, of course, that there is no benefit or comparative advantage to the star.

What the star does well, comparatively, is to minimize the distance between any given pair of nodes [and particularly pairs that involve the central node]. Start at the bottom-left corner of the “ring” and “star” and label each node, going clockwise, with a letter [bottom-left = A, left = B, etc; the central node in the star is F]. Now count up the number of crossings needed to get from, say, A to D in either structure. In the ring, it takes 3 crossings [as it would for B to E or C to F]. In the star, however, it only takes you 2 crossings to get from A to D. More importantly, the distance between any of A, B, C, D, or E and the central node F is only 1 crossing under the star, whereas it is anywhere from 1-3 with the ring.

Even more efficient at connecting nodes is the “fully connected” structure. Any given pair is only 1 crossing apart! This added efficiency might be redundant, though, and so this structure isn't always preferable [especially if there is a cost or even a negative value to building the extra “bridges”]. Let's put all this in some real-world terms now, to see if we can make sense of these competing structures. One good example of a real-world “ring” is a traffic circle / roundabout. From any starting point, the distance to your desired ending point is relatively low [the fact you have to travel in a particular direction is an important consideration in topology, but some “magic” roundabouts even remove this restriction].

Why not just connect every pair of entrances and exits directly in a traffic situation where we might otherwise use a roundabout? The answer should be obvious. Does this mean the roundabout / ring structure is always desired? Of course not. A real-world example of a competing structure, the “star”, is in the design of hospital nursing wings. Typically, the patient rooms are distributed in roughly a star-like shape around the central “node” that is the nurses' station. The reason for this is clear, and is the chief benefit of the star: it minimizes the distance between the outer nodes [patients] and the central node [nurses]. We don't need to “fully connect” this graph, because patients don't interact with other patients.

Empire Builder and Dampfross challenged players to build a hugely interconnected network of cities [nodes] such that they could trace a path, and continue tracing it, between successive randomly selected pairs of cities in as little distance as possible. The networks ended up extremely bushy and complicated, looking like some combination of the “bus” with the “tree” or “mesh” shapes. The “bus” baseline serves the purpose in-game of providing the option to begin tracing a path not knowing where it will end, and still end up with a minimal overall travel distance. The “tree” or “mesh” secondary shapes allow a wide variety of overlapping paths, which helps since the game gives players three pairs of nodes to work on at a time.

What the “bus”, or “bus / tree” and “bus / mesh” hybrids, do not do well is prevent back-tracking, which is a necessary evil [and time-waster] often encountered in Empire Builder, where the “holy grail” of card draws are ones that let you string pick-up and delivery locations back-to-back so that your inevitable back-tracking [retracing the same path in the opposite direction, East Coast to West Coast, then West to East] allows you to actually make progress in the game [picking up something from the nurses' station on the way from Patient 1 to Patient 2, since you have to stop off there anyway]. The game is won, race-style, purely by minimizing back-tracking and maximizing efficiency when you do have to reverse direction.

18XX games present a more restrictive path-tracing challenge. The goal is to connect as many as of the most valuable cities as possible, and then trace as many paths as possible between them, but the game prevents you from back-tracking or even re-using any link [like Euler's islands]; points are scored every time an “island” is visited. The way to maximize path-tracing points, then, is to start and end as many paths as possible at the higher valued cities, using every possible path into or out of them that is available. Networks tend to look something like a “star” or multiple “stars” with a “tree” or “mesh” connecting them. The benefit is that players can trace many non-overlapping paths using high-valued cities as starting and ending points.

Where the 18XX games demonstrate their notorious meanness in the path-tracing portion of the game is in allowing players to interrupt the connecting “tree” or “mesh” between an opponents' high-value “stars”. This forces players to use the “star” centers in the middle of their paths rather than as end-points, which reduces points dramatically if the center is a high-value city, since players can count a city every time it serves as a starting or ending point of differently traced paths, but only once for being in the middle of a path. It also prevents players from tracing a path from one high-value “star” center to another elsewhere on the board, and especially [in the most extreme cases] from being able to do this twice with two paths.

One of the earliest influences on Roads & Boats were surely these heavily network-focused games of efficient path-tracing. Roads & Boats even carries over the literal “drawing paths on the board” mechanism from Empire Builder and Dampfross. The goals and efficiencies particular to Roads & Boats are more akin to Empire Builder as well, but the Splotter design team have repeatedly declared and demonstrated that 18XX are among the games that most inspire and influence them so there is at least a subconscious influence from that source, too. The thing that sets Roads & Boats apart, and is its chief mechanical innovation, is that path-tracing along the network doesn't have an immediate impact on scoring.

From the idea of route-building / path-tracing as an end in itself [rewarded immediately with VP gains], Roads & Boats developed a richer experience that used topological efficiency to power a resource management game. This particular combination, resulting in a type of supply chain management feel, hasn't really been replicated since [there's one exception I know of I'll mention briefly in a later section], but certain characteristics and niceties necessary to pull it off have been used and reused in umpteen-thousand resource management games that followed. We'll look at the resource management aspect in detail later, but let's focus now on the purely topological concerns in Roads & Boats. A typical late-game board might look like this:

From the pictures, a number of topological patterns for path-tracing are apparent. Much of these players' networks are “fully connected”, with the outskirts following primarily a branching design around the connected central core, like a sort of “super-star”. These patterns aren't accidental, but as in Empire Builder and 18XX are the players' attempt to tackle the particular path-tracing problems presented by the game. There is a relatively high cost, in resources and especially action efficiency, to correcting poor network design at a later point in time, and the game's central challenge is making the right decisions in designing your production network. This entails two elements: 1) Where to build production buildings in relation to each other; 2) How best to connect those buildings.

One of the things that makes Roads & Boats' topological game tick is that there are two contrasting resource models at play in the game, which each require different network shapes to function efficiently. The primary model, the long conversion chain running from mines to gold to coins to stock certificates, requires a lot of back-and-forth path-tracing between all the different producers. This would usually be best accomplished by a network where nodes are connected sequentially / serially, like a bus or a ring, but the game doesn't simply move resources through the chain assembly line style. Instead, there are frequent required injections of supporting resources [fuel to smelt gold into coins, paper to print stock certificates on] that necessitate something more like a mesh or a tree.

The other resource utilization model in the game is concerned with infrastructure, building the factories and refineries needed to make the production chain happen. This model is also tasked with building the actual paths to be traced along that production chain. Under this second model, there are just two primary resources to contend with: wood and stone. Every production building in the game costs some combination of wood and stone to build, most secondary producers require wood as an input, and every road built costs stone. There are only so many places where a player can pick up wood or stone, and the challenge is to get the resources to increasingly far-reaching destinations efficiently. This is best accomplished by positioning your wood / stone producers centrally, as in the star network shape.

Once you start trying to play these two resource games simultaneously [and you have to], the demands on your network-building and path-tracing efficiency increase tenfold. This is further complicated by the many sub-games you need to play: Getting the raw materials of timber and clay to the woodcutter and stone factory, increasing the size and capacity of your transport fleet, staying up-to-date in the research game so you have access to the advanced producers you need, and making sure you don't fall behind in wonder construction. All of these mini-games have their own topological efficiencies to concern yourself with. Getting all your ducks geese in a row and making sure the trains ferries run on time are extraordinarily puzzling challenges unmatched in difficulty in the path-tracing genre.

Terrain + Territory

When Settlers of Catan appeared on the scene in 1995, the primary impact it had on the terrain of the hobby was to popularize the idea that terrain on a map could provide resources that could be used elsewhere in the game to do things. There had been games before where terrain and your position on the map interacted directly, of course, in the form of wargames where terrain affects movement or defense or whatnot, or in the form of things like Kings & Things or Titan where terrain affects what creatures you're able to summon in an area. There had also been resource management games before, like the old AH Civilization, but in Civ your resource collection is only based on your overall presence on the board and not on your position relative to any particular terrain. Settlers did something different.

Nearer to the Settlers model of resource collection is the progenitor of its die-rolling mechanism, McMulti / Crude, but your resource collection is only determined by what you have built and not where you have built it relative to terrain. A few obscure titles from the old AH are variously near to Settlers' resource system: In Outdoor Survival you gain resources necessary for the eponymous survival by moving over different terrain; in New World there is a blind-hex variant where the type of terrain determines the general productivity of a region; in Source Of The Nile your discoveries may depend on the terrain you're in. Faidutti's Valley Of The Mammoths is sort of a cross between Kings & Things and Outdoor Survival; there's only one resource, food, but terrain affects how you collect it and whether it spoils. The old SPI title, After The Holocaust, has hexes which provide various resources if controlled.

Where we find the nearest analogue to Settlers, however, and probably a joint inspiration of both Settlers and Roads & Boats [which it shares other mechanisms with] is in the forgotten Eon [maker of Cosmic Encounter and Dune] game, Borderlands. At the start of a game of Borderlands, which is essentially a Diplomacy-style game of world-domination, resource production chits are distributed pseudo-randomly across the board and determine what resources [timber, coal, iron, gold, horses], if any, are available in each territory. Every turn, as in Roads & Boats, a resource chit is generated by these producers, and players controlling the territories can use those resources to build weapons, boats, or cities [which are needed to win the game]. They can also use horses, Roads & Boats style, to move goods.

Nearly as far [1982] behind Settlers as we are beyond it, Borderlands implemented the idea of positional control on a map as a determinant of what resources were available to players in a resource management game. Borderlands was more focused on territorial control than on resource management, but its resource concept is something that was developed in Settlers and many future games, all using different methods of on-board positional play to determine who would get what resources. The heart of Settlers is choosing the correct locations on the board to build your settlements so as to get the best resource production, and then making the best positional attacks to expand your own territory and block off everyone else's. It may have had the first incarnation of the blocking interaction that Euros are known for.

Worth talking about here is La Città, which, though published later than Roads & Boats, has a history which pegs its development as taking place concurrently with Settlers in the early 1990s. The first prototype was created in 1992, while later prototype images show a Settlers like hex grid with play on the vertices [and Settlers roads on the hex sides!]. In its final incarnation, La Citta gives players resources based on what their budding cities are next to [either gold or wheat], and then allows players to expand their territory and eventually take over population from neighboring cities. Once again, the interaction is about highly aggressive positional play and siphoning off opportunities from your opponents. This interaction isn't necessarily central to Roads & Boats, but is included for those who want it.

You never “own” territory in Roads & Boats [you don't even own the roads your transport fleet moves on], but you are able to carve out a tenuous amount of control over territory by building walls and developing “your” road network in such a way that it is difficult for other players to link up with it. You can also use walls aggressively by linking up with an opponent's network and building literal roadblocks in their way. Managing walls, knocking down barriers, and pushing forward into your opponents' space are key tactical maneuvers in more aggressively played games of Roads & Boats. This element of the game is reminiscent of Teuber's other, more confrontational, positional game, Löwenherz. An extremely aggressive game of Roads & Boats can end with long stretches of wall marking off clumps of territory as if you scored for controlling it!

What is more central to Roads & Boats than this kind of territorial expansion is the underlying idea of terrain as a resource. It is not as direct a resource as it is in Settlers or Borderlands, where you just control a territory and get its product; instead, players are required to build up the infrastructure that can harvest resources from each type of terrain and have some level of freedom in determining exactly what the output of the terrain will be. In building the production buildings, players choose between primary and secondary producers. Primary producers are restricted to certain types of terrain and produce the appropriate type of resource for that terrain [lumber from woods, clay from quarries, etc]. The catch is that only one producer may be on each tile, so to build a secondary producer [unrestricted by terrain] you must give up a tile's primary product.

The first step in the long logistical planning process of getting raw goods turned into wealth or wonder points is to decide where you will get each type of raw resource [what terrain tiles you will choose to turn into primary producers] and where you will give up production of primary goods in order to build the more complex elements of your supply chain. Because you will have to physically move goods across the map, the layout of terrain tiles in each game has similar importance and strategic impact as it does in a game of Settlers. The most influential decisions you will make in the game come in this initial planning stage where you decide how your network will lay out on the map and how you will make the best use of the terrain before you. There are two primary elements predetermined by the map that help you make these decisions: mountains and rivers.

Where you get the raw gold necessary to make any headway along the game's primary goods conversion path is in the mountain terrain hexes, and nowhere else. These are easily the most important terrain tiles on any Roads & Boats setup, and in well-designed scenarios, they are centrally located or otherwise positioned so as to create a competitive race to connect to and control these figurative and literal “gold mines”. They are often the terrain tiles on which players' independent networks make “first contact”, allowing transports to “invade” into opposing territory, and in less aggressive games might be the only place where such connections are made. As you plan your road layout and the position of secondary producers, especially coal and coin factories, you will need to take into account the distance from the mines where gold [and iron] is produced.

The second strategic terrain consideration is the layout of the river and sea terrain hexes on the map. Rivers are preset paths that can be used by water transports and are equivalent in every way to roads, except that you don't get to decide where they go. Seas may only be traversed by water transports, obviously, but require transports to make extra moves to “dock” with adjoining land in order to pick up goods. The tradeoff for the restricted positional flexibility is that water transports can carry more and move faster than their equivalent land transports. It is not strictly necessary to use water transports in a game, but a player who includes them in their plans and develops their supply chain such that producers are positioned along rivers and coastlines whereever possible will be able to be more efficient and do “double duty” by transporting goods by land and by sea.

Water transports and terrain are probably the most difficult entities in the game to use effectively. You don't have the freedom to build new paths if you find you've screwed up in the positioning of some production facility, so there is no Plan B to fall back on. When used well, however, they are a deciding factor in the game, and allow you to move more goods with greater efficiency than a player stuck being a landlubber. Additionally, water hexes can support one of the more important primary producers in the game, the oil rig, which gives you fuel directly without having to burn wood [and transport it in]. Fuel is needed both to smelt gold into coins at the mint and to create the biggest and fastest transports, in both the land and water categories. Late in the game, a steady supply of free fuel releases transporters from having to support a coal burner so they can do more important things.

The terrain in Roads & Boats is of significant strategic importance, not only in terms of what each territory produces [as in Settlers or Borderlands] but in terms of the distance between terrain features and in terms of secondary features like rivers and seas. More than in just about any terrain-dependent resource game preceding or following [Antiquity is a notable exception], the terrain in Roads & Boats provides a “landscape” on which the game plays out differently every time. Many resource or path-tracing games that followed that have modular [Keythedral, Attika] or alternate boards [Age of Steam, Power Grid] don't have nearly this variability. The modular terrain is either only locally relevant rather than of strategic import, or else the new map plays nearly the same as the old one aside from the added expansion mechanisms. Different maps in Roads & Boats truly present new puzzles to players.

Claim Jumps + Cube Churning

If anything comes to mind when you think of a modern Euro game, it is worker placement and cube pushing. I would argue that Splotter essentially created both genres when it released Roads & Boats [and Bus] in 1999. At the very least, these games are perhaps the earliest examples of these two mechanisms, if not the actual impetus for their development and current popularity. The central ideas from Roads & Boats that you do not own a resource until you have claimed it from a commons and that a resource has no value until converted into something better are at the mechanical and ludological heart of the present resource management sub-genre that dominates Euro games. They are foundational to the way modern Euro designers approach the process of game design, and they came from Roads & Boats.

Two games released in 2004, one year before the firestorm that was Caylus [which we'll get to soon], took key mechanisms from Roads & Boats and focused them in a way that portended a change to come in the prevailing ludographic landscape: Keythedral and Neuland. In both games, there is a map of terrain tiles that produce [or refine] resources which are commonly available for any / all players to lay claim to [just as in Roads & Boats]. The shift from Roads & Boats' focus is that these games are highly compacted, and players don't have even tenuous control over an identifiable production network / supply chain. Rather, players' competing access to resources overlaps from the very beginning of the game, and the focus is not on development of a production system to optimize output / throughput but on claim-jumping.

In Keythedral and Neuland, players will position their workers on the map each turn [through various mechanisms that look a lot like worker placement] so as to lay claim to particular resources for the turn. These claims are exclusive but transitory; in Keythedral, players get to store up resources between turns so there is at least that level of permanence, but in Neuland a resource claimed on a turn must be used immediately for something else [there are not even any resource tokens or cards]. In Keythedral, since worker placement is iterative / additive [happens one-at-a-time around the table], access and precedence are the important concerns; Keythedral “borrows” the wall-building mechanism from Roads & Boats that allows players to block off certain producers for their exclusive use. In Neuland, “worker placement” is a little more nuanced.

The placement of workers in Neuland happens all at once on a player's turn; each player has a certain number of worker tokens to assign to claims on their turn, and they position them in a sort of chain across the board [through a rather awkward “movement” mechanism] and then “fire up” the chosen production engine by “collecting” virtual resources and “converting” them through claimed secondary producers in order to build more production buildings to the shared map and eventually [the goal of the game] lay permanent claim to certain prestige buildings [which offer no productive use]. The game has a bit more of the “this is my supply chain” feel of Roads & Boats [despite neither game offering true “ownership” of production facilities] because you can maneuver your workers in such a way as to block of resource / production buildings for multiple turns.

Immediately after Keythedral and Neuland were released, another game that incorporated and built on similar claim-jumping mechanism took the gaming world by storm: Caylus. Caylus' worker placement mechanism has been hailed as the first of its kind by some, and is certainly among the clearest interpretations of the concept, but it was preceded by at least three games [Keydom, Bus, and Way Out West] and I think owes a bit to Roads & Boats, too [especially as mediated by the likes of Keythedral and Neuland]. In a recent interview, William Attia describes the generative spark for Caylus' design as being that of a “line” of “effects” that players chose from in an action draft and then activated in order, with the pool of available effects growing over time. I don't think he was directly influenced by Roads & Boats, but it and Neuland have very similar game structures.

This sequential stringing together of actions / effects related to resource gathering, refinement, and eventual use toward victory is a page right out of Roads & Boats. Perhaps not Attia himself but a playtester who had played Roads & Boats or its derivatives offered up some of the early changes to the game, like players adding buildings to the board, based on that experience. In style, at least, if not in actual derivation, Caylus follows much of the trail blazed by Roads & Boats. These similarities are admittedly not extreme, and were Caylus [or even the much less appreciated Keythedral or Neuland] the only game to show the influence of Roads & Boats, I wouldn't have much of a case here to argue its importance. But, I think there are quite a few other games as seminal as Caylus that show the influence of Splotter's original cube churner.

In particular, I think the influence is also evident in Rosenberg's “landmark game”, Le Havre, and to a lesser extent in Agricola [which Rosenberg has acknowledged was influenced heavily by Splotter's other giant, Antiquity; Rosenberg rates both Antiquity and Roads & Boats as 9s, by the way]. There are two evidences of Roads & Boats' influence on Le Havre: 1) The accumulation of goods mechanism [also seen in Agricola]; 2) The resource conversion chain game structure. The accumulation of goods is a key feature of Roads & Boats, where every primary producer just piles up goods every turn until they are taken [sound familiar?]. I don't think Rosenberg has ever identified where the idea for this mechanism [as he has for the harvest mechanism], but I don't think I've ever seen it tied to resources [and not, say, currency like in Puerto Rico] except in Roads & Boats and Rosenberg's games.

The resource conversion chains in Le Havre also bear similarity to Roads & Boats. There are a lot of “cube churning” games where you gather resources and turn them directly into points, but there surprisingly aren't many where you have to convert primary resources to secondary or tertiary resources before they're worth anything or can be converted to points. Most of these games that I've identified are Splotter designs or ones I've already argued were influenced by them [Keythedral and Neuland, for instance].... or Rosenberg titles. The size and scope of Le Havre's “goods cycle” is similar to that in Roads & Boats, and considerably more involved than any other non-Splotter game until Ora & Labora last year. Get some cows, then get wood and bricks to build a butchery, then kill the cows for meat and hides, then turn the hides into leather, then sell the leather [and meat] for gold. Etc.

Conclusion

I hope I have shown how Roads & Boats winds it way through the morass of modern Euro resource management designs while it picks up and delivers the best mechanisms from prior genres of the same. It is truly a seminal work of design with an influence that can be seen in nearly all of the most successful resource management and logistics games that followed. Indirectly, through its co-creative effect [with Bus] on the two largest worker placement titles, Caylus and Agricola, it has roots that run even deeper than the heavy cube pushers that it exemplifies, to games as diverse as Stone Age, Troyes, and Dominant Species. Additionally, as a logistical / engine building game par excellence, it has a similar indirect role in shaping designs like Homesteaders, Through The Ages, and 51st State.

Roads & Boats stands, I think, at the intersection of two eras of design, the 90s era of singularly focused games that develop one simple mechanism out into a full game, and the current era that began sometime around the release of Puerto Rico in 2001 and continues to produce multifaceted games with many interlocking and overlapping mechanisms that give rise to multiple paths to victory. With one foot on each side of this divide, Roads & Boats not only rocketed a new publisher and design team toward still increasing levels of innovation, but inspired a multitude of designs by dozens of other designers, many of whom don't even know that the ideas and mechanisms they use so often were previously tested, developed, and exemplified in this wonderful design. It is truly a game of great importance to the hobby.

Suddenly a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

n.b. I have not played games from all of these designers, but I've been watching all of their output. I can't recommend a particular game from all or even most, but I think [from reading comments from others and seeing growth from the designers] that I can recommend them in general.

I had this idea for a post quite some time ago, but never got around to putting it together. Mostly, I wasn't sure I'd quite be able to come up with enough content to make it happen. I think it's a valuable idea, however, especially with the meteoric rise of Kickstarter / indie popularity. I'll give it a shot.

What I'd like to do is introduce you to ten [actually, twelve] game designers / developers who I think are going places and are worth watching.

None of these designers [that I know of] have been seeking major publication [though some are published], instead choosing the independent route.

No surprises here for anyone that's been following me. I still consider the Decktet, P.D.'s magnum opus, to be a wonderfully compelling game system, and it's clear that it hasn't finished showing its potential yet.

P.D. is a professional philosopher in "real life", but a brilliant artist and imaginative designer in his gaming pursuits. The Decktet, if you haven't heard, is a deck of cards in traditional 52-card style based on the idea that most of the cards have more than one suit, with the suit-pairings all mixed up throughout the asymmetric deck. It's illustrated beautifully, in the style of an other-worldly Tarot deck, and is available freely as a print-and-play project or for purchase.

Another recent project along similar lines is the Blue Sea deck, which is P.D.'s artistic interpretation of an Empire Deck [six-suited Bridge deck]. In terms of games designed, P.D. has crafted what I consider to be two of the Decktet's best games, Colour Bazaar and Goblin Market. Both are economic filler games, Colour Bazaar being a more complex version of Knizia's Wildlife Safari and Goblin Market being a mash-up of Schacht's Don and Coloretto.

Why you should be watching: I don't think the Decktet is done growing yet. We've already seen two editions of the Decktet book, compiling some of the best games for the system, with the latter including nearly double the number of games in the original edition.

The Decktet doesn't just play traditional-style card-games, either. There are auction games, tableau-filling / tile-laying games, resource management games, and "pawns moving on a track" games, not to mention the excellent pick-up-and-deliver board game still under playtesting.

Here's a guy who I have not played any games from, but still think you should be aware of and watching. John's company, Small Box Games, was founded to bring his mostly card-based designs to market and to combat [as the name suggests] the wasteful over-packaged, over-published ways of the hobby at large.

For a guy who nobody knows and a company that is still a start-up, he's been remarkably productive; in the past 4 years, Small Box has published nearly 40 different titles. The games are nearly all card games, with the majority being 2-player exercises. The themes and mechanisms are varied, but are usually a mix of historic and esoteric.

Bhazum and Omen are card-drafting games played in two phases, a draft first and then a head-to-head combat, following in the style of Magic: The Gathering or Campaign Manager 2008. They are each quite well regarded, with average ratings well over 7.0; Omen has even managed to reach rank #13 in the [admittedly sparse] Customizable Games subdomain.

Irondale is a city-building game for 2-4 that looks to have some similarities to Cambridge Games' Barons which was published 1 year after Irondale. It's not as well-regarded overall, but it seems to have quite a few fans, and has generated a number of expansions. If Agnes likes it, it can't be that bad []. At the very least, invoking its name gives you instant gaming hipster cred.

Why you should be watching: John's company is designed to meet the oft-requested criteria of portable, fun, 2+ player games. He seems to be putting out a much wider variety of styles for that audience than, say, the Kosmos two-player series has [how many "Compare sums across 3-5 columns" games do we really need?]. That, and his design chops seem to be improving, with his most recent titles much better received than his older ones.

I don't think he's done designing yet, and the basic concept behind his company is compelling. I think once he hits upon a real winner, a "killer app" for his company, that his catalogue and renown will really take off. There is a huge market for the types of games he's designing, and the only real missing piece to the puzzle is for him to pin down a publisher's dream game with the quality, replayability, and expandability of something like Dominion or Race.

Helmut and Lonny are among the more ambitious and more well-regarded designers working in the 18xx series of train games that Francis Tresham invented. 1844 and 1880, in particular, [neither of which I've played] seem to be all but universally loved by 18XX diehards, while 1848 is no slouch either. Among 18XX games with a substantial pool of raters [50+], these would rank #1, #2, and #4 in the series [1860 is #3], with average ratings astoundingly high at 8.52, 8.44, and 7.95.

Their entry-level game, Poseidon, was an adventurous attempt to do what had been attempted many times before: Provide a playable, accessible introductory game to the 18XX series. In large part, it was successful [certainly much more successful than prior attempts like 18EZ]. It is rather far removed from the family, but is decidedly recognizable as a member. The chief differences are the use of the strange "discovery" track-laying mechanism from the original 1829, the hard limit on number of rounds, and the relatively stable stock market.

Still, Poseidon is [I think, and I have played it] an interesting game and definitely a reasonable introduction to the mechanisms and general feel of the series. Unlike some of the other commonly suggested introductory games [the many print-and-plays built around US states, for instance], it is available in an easily found, professionally produced edition from Mayfair / Lookout Games and finishes in an amount of time that suits most evening / weekend game groups used to playing 1.5 - 2 hour economic Euros like Age Of Steam, Brass, Container, etc.

Poseidon isn't going to set the 18XX world on fire, nor likely even the general economic gaming world on fire, but it serves its purpose well while maintaining reasonable replay value, and it does it in style with nice art and great components [something that can't be said for most 18XX titles]. At #597 in the rankings, it's outpaced only by the other Mayfair-produced titles, 1830, 1856, and 1870. I could see Helmut and Lonny producing a follow-up to this game, set in some other non-rail historical period, and offering more 18XX newbies a relatively easy start.

Why you should be watching: Helmut and Lonny have been releasing large, well-received 18XX titles on a regular basis for over a decade now and don't seem poised to stop anytime soon. Poseidon was an exciting new direction [for some fans of the series, myself included] that was well-conceived and reasonably well-executed.

A follow-up that fixes some of the complaints from 18XX fans [complaints from newbies to the series are much different in substance] could be really exciting. Seems like they've been on a 2-3 year development cycle for awhile now, and Poseidon was a 2010 title... so keep your eyes pealed for late 2012 or 2013?

Patrick makes mostly risk management games with pseudo-simulative historic themes, kind of like a doppelganger of Martin Wallace. He seems to do very small print runs [or at least attract a very small number of customers], so the number of ratings [115 at most] for his games keeps them relatively unrecognized in the rankings / hotness, despite very good ratings overall. He's the first designer on this list that I'm pretty sure most of my readers will not have heard of.

The games have had marginal success within their target niches, but none have really even approached "cult classic" territory yet. Bullfrog Goldfield gets a mixed response, some seeing it as a decent alternative to 18XX in the stocks-and-trains genre, while others pan it for being too random. Blockade Runner is the game that brought the designer to my attention, when I saw it described as one of the best economic simulation games available, whereas I'd written it off as a wargame from the cover.

In general, his games are hailed as being highly thematic, historically accurate hybrid games, mixing elements from Eurogames, wargames, and economic games like Brass, Container, or 18XX. It seems a territory ripe for exploitation, as the only major designers really following this trinitarian tack are Wallace and perhaps Chad Jensen [remains to be seen if he'll do another economic game, or a true hybrid] or Mac Gerdts [whose games aren't quite wargamey enough to rival Wallace].

Patrick's company, Numbskull Games, might actually have the most success with a game that isn't his own creation, the upcoming Divided Republic designed by Alex Bagosy. It's a card-driven election / political game set in a time period [1860 in US history] that allows 4 players / parties rather than the usual 2 [as in 1960: The Making of the President and Twilight Struggle]. The game was successfully Kickstarted back in October, which indicates it has some requisite level of hotness to build on.

Why you should be watching: Patrick really seems to have a handle on how to design, develop, and produce a richly thematic game that remains highly playable [something that can't always be said for other designers I'll introduce on this list]. And by "thematic", I don't mean nuking the shit out of zombie trolls.

If you're a fan of Wallace or thematic economic games, I suspect that Patrick and his company should be on your watchlist. I'd seen and written off Bullfrog Goldfield on account of the mildly cartoony art and name [admittedly a poor filter], thinking it to be a Dark Horse clone / cousin, but I suspect I was quite wrong.

If you follow print-and-play design trends at all on BGG, you'll have encountered Todd's work. His graphic design style is unmistakable and permeates all of his 30+ designs. The thread documenting his current design projects is 43 pages long as of this blog, consisting of over 1,000 replies, and that's in only 1 year's time since it was posted.

He has a rather unique design oeuvre, with his works consisting primarily of 1-player or 1-2 player designs, all print-and-play, nearly all card-based, mostly set in a hybrid steampunk / medieval / mad scientist world, and illustrated in his instantly recognizable minimalist style. The games are mostly light Euro designs, but run the gamut of mechanisms within that genre.

The two that I own and have played, Steam Lords and Capek Golems, are respectively a worker placement / "building shit" game in its essentials and a rather bizarrely themed light economic set collection card game. Both have some issues, but are compelling enough that I feel comfortable recommending his designs in general. He's constantly tweaking and revising his games based on continual playtests, which means that no flaw goes undiscovered or unresolved for long.

If I wanted to get into solitaire gaming, his Shadows Upon Lassadar series [and the solo Aether Captains titles] are probably how I would do it. Lassadar is a quest-based fantasy game that mixes in a number of hex-and-counter mini-wargames. Most of his games seem to have this kind of mechanical hybridization, being a sum of their parts and having multiple different styles of play going on simultaneously. He's decidedly not locked into following any dime-a-dozen design tropes.

Why you should be watching: Todd's artwork, at the very least, is worth investigating his games on account of, if only to peruse the galleries. His games don't seem to have any particular target market in mind [unlike the last three designers on this list], instead just being what they are and hoping to find demand somewhere. There are appeals to both Ameritrashers and Eurogamers.

More than anything, I find his design approach compelling. All of his games are print-and-play [for now], and most he makes available for easy purchase on-demand from ArtsCow. The games don't require specialized components to play, only a few cubes and the decks of cards or printed boards. The consistent theming links otherwise unrelated games, which is neat.

Not only does Néstor have over 30 game designs to his own credit, his company nestorgames has published well over 100 different traditional and modern titles in the abstract strategy genre. The games [nearly] all share the signature nestor quirk of being stored in canvas pencil cases, using floppy / rollable mousepad-like boards, and pieces made of laser-cut acrylic. Néstor's self-proclaimed goal for the company is "to publish every game that can be produced with this method" and he's well underway in that pursuit, with no signs of slowing down.

The games are increasingly popular with the abstract crowd, but the relatively high price [for abstracts] of $25-35 or more has, I suspect, kept outsiders of the genre away. When you can buy stuff like Hey, That's My Fish!, Hive, or even Through the Desert for under $25 from most online merchants, the unproven nature of nestorgames' products isn't a compelling value to most buyers. I myself have quite a few of them on my wish-/watch-list, but haven't pulled the trigger yet because I'm not a huge abstract player but also partly because of the price.

Néstor's own designs range from the very traditional OMEGA, Coffee, Pentactic, and TAIJI to the rather more imaginative Adaptoid, Hippos & Crocodiles [& Buffalos], Gardens of Mars, and Feed the ducks. He's also designed quite a few games for his own nestortiles game system as well as the Shibumi game system, which is among the smallest and most concise game systems, consisting of nothing but a 4 x 4 board [with recessed spaces] and 3 colors of stackable marbles / balls. Many of his games are well-rated, so he seems to have some chops to go with his obvious knack at publishing.

Obviously, you'd have to be a fan of abstracts to get into most of these games. They're nearly all 2-player, perfect information affairs, but the production and theming [at least in Néstor's own titles] is quirky enough that it might be sufficient to draw some folks in who like the "strategy" portion of "abstract strategy" gaming, but not the "abstract" part so much. On my own personal wish-list from Néstor and/or his company are Hop It!, Jin Li, Feed the ducks, Sugar Gliders, Hello, Dolly!, and Adaptoid. I suspect most gamers could find something of interest in the nestorgames catalogue, too.

Why you should be watching: Néstor is single-handedly, though slowly, changing the face of modern abstract game publication and design. Bizarrely, he doesn't have a single game original to his company in the top 100 abstracts as ranked / categorized by BGG, but that just shows the oddity of BGG's subdomains more than anything having to do with nestorgames' output.

Folks like self-proclaimed "abstract rat" reviewer Bruce Murphy have an almost fanatical obsession with the nestorgames' lineup. Other GeekBuddies whose opinion on abstracts I trust unquestionably also praise many of the games. Abstract fans who are in the know almost universally appreciate these games and the simple beauty they provide in design and packaging befitting a modern abstract.

Around 1999, Splotter launched with an initial catalogue of about 6 or 7 games, championed by Bus and Roads & Boats. Together, these two probably created the genre we now recognize as the resource management / worker placement Eurogame. Bus, with Keydom, is among the earliest games to make explicit use of the exclusive action-drafting mechanism we now know as "worker placement". Roads & Boats is perhaps the earliest example of a "resource conversion" Euro [i.e. cube-churner]. These are the two halves that together created Caylus [by conscious design choice on William Attia's part or not].

Later Splotter designs like Antiquity directly influenced the creation of the other huge worker placement resource game, Agricola, as described by Uwe Rosenberg in his "advent calendar" design diary. And the dynamic design duo of Jeroen and Joris hasn't stopped innovating and creating exciting games, with the brilliantly nasty Indonesia following Antiquity by a year, and the Merchant of Venus reboot Duck Dealer and satirical [and timely] Greed Incorporated following shortly after. The Splotter team seem to have left behind the smaller titles that spotted their catalogue early in their history, and this has been a really good thing.

Jeroen and Joris are currently playtesting a new heavy civilization-building game [to complete the trilogy with R&B and Antiquity?] that looks exceptionally promising. Of special note is that the title / theme, The Great Zimbabwe, is remarkably refreshing in its focus on an area of the world other than Medieval Europe or Ancient Mesopotamia / Near East, where nearly all other [historic] civilization games are set. Inca Empire is the only comparably themed civ game I can think of, but the actual civ-building in the game is very light. Great Zimbabwe promises to be a really good economic / tech-tree style development game.

A huge plus is that Great Zimbabwe looks to be considerably more directly interactive than either of their prior two civ games, Roads & Boats or Antiquity, which were largely multiplayer-solitaire optimization exercises, or at least tended that way with non-aggressive players. Reports that players are forced to interact in Great Zimbabwe through the pricing / market system are promising. The monetary / production system almost sounds like Container's. "Civ lite" is a dead genre [in fact, except for length, the original Civilization is a remarkably light / simple / clean game]; what we need are more heavy civ games, and this looks to be one.

Why you should be watching: It remains my contention that much of what we recognize as modern Euro design [resource management, production chains, worker placement, etc] is due in large part to Splotter's early and continued influence on the hobby. Jeroen and Joris are silently shaping these genres, and don't seem intent on stopping. Their games are uber-, proto-Euros that stretch the limit of what the genre can do.

There aren't many designers or companies out there that are putting out the kind of games that Splotter makes [much less as reliably as Splotter does]. These are huge, all-afternoon affairs that present extraordinarily complicated puzzles to players unlike those they face in most other games. Things like Ora et Labora / Le Havre or the games of the next designer on this list are close, but Splotter's output still maintains a charm all its own.

Not many people's résumés begin "____ is a game designer and rocket scientist" as Phil Eklund's does. [Then again, not many people wear funny hats and handlebar moustaches, but Phil is the second designer on this list to fit that description.] Phil produces games that are quite literally unlike those of any other designer. Whereas the Splotter duo's differences are of scope and size, the difference between one of Phil Eklund's games and any other designer's is one of dimensional planes of existence.

The following is an excerpt from one of his rulebooks:

"Examples: 1. A comet impact has the extinction calculus " >3 AaBGHMS ". An immigrant with BBBa would be killed, because it has more than three of the fatal DNA. A genotype with AAPPS is spared. 2. A solar flare has the extinction calculus "size > 4". A size five sea cow is doomed; a size four tyrannosaur is safe. It also has the calculus " >2 Aa ". This will kill off triple-armored turtles." I defy you to find the term "extinction calculus" [or "triple-armored turtle", for that matter] used by another designer.

But the games seem to be meeting with gradually increasing critical acclaim. They've always been interesting for their educational / simulation value [and sheer oddity], but recent entries like High Frontier and Bios: Megafauna actually appear to be playable games. On a recent episode of Ludology, Phil described his playtesting process, which he basically described as putting together the simulation and then asking playtesters to tell him how to score it as a game. Strangely enough... this works?

Why you should be watching: Phil is a sort of Renaissance man among game designers, with all the eccentricity you would expect from a true polymath. There is quite literally nobody [that I'm aware of] doing what he is doing in hobby game design [i.e. outside of academia, where I suspect there might be a few "serious game" designers doing similar work]. In fact, there's not even anyone trying.

His vision for game design is completely unique; his themes stretch time scales unbelievably large and incorporate vastly detailed simulations; his games are [I hear] somehow actually playable despite their inscrutability. His is the type of work that makes you believe this is a legitimate hobby for "serious" minded people, and not just something you do for fun in your mother's basement.

Daniel is primarily an artist [the t-shirt / logo I used here is one of his designs] and RPG designer, but he does have a scattering of completely unknown, mostly abstract, board games to his credit. He also has a game design blog that is very nice and has more than a few interesting insights. I've chosen Daniel for this list because of his ad hoc, brainstorm, catch-as-catch-can approach to game design. His blog is littered with games and game ideas made up on the spot for no reason other than to try something.

I don't think he tries [or even intends to try] to develop most of the ideas and game skeletons he puts up at his blog. It's more an exercise in game design processes and inspiration. And he has some incredible flashes of inspiration, like the recent Minoquar, a solitaire maze game playable using any arbitrary QR code the player has handy. His "wabi sabi" method for "designing" an asymmetric deck of cards is another flash of elegant genius. Then there's the Thousand Year Game Design Challenge.

The concept behind the challenge was to design a game that could potentially have the longevity of something like Chess or Tic-Tac-Toe or even Hide-and-Seek or Tag. The only restrictions were that it had to be able to be explained [cutely] in 1,000 words / 1,000 seconds or less, and that it had to have broad-ranging accessibility and appeal. A couple of BGGers sent in entries, but the winner was Take-Back-Toe designed by James Ernest of Cheapass Games fame [a choice apropos to this blog topic, given James' approach to design and publication].

Whether Take-Back-Toe is a "great game" isn't really the point; the design challenge wasn't about making great games. Tic-Tac-Toe isn't a great game. It's broken. It's still played millennia after it was first devised. The idea of the challenge was to try to identify and embody those qualities that give a game or pastime [social activities / parlour games were also entered to the contest] truly lasting appeal. Daniel explains in the final announcement of the challenge winner what appealed to him about the game. The game itself is sort of a Pachisi / Mancala hybrid.

These types of abstracts--Pachisi, Mancala, Checkers, Tic-Tac-Toe, Nine Men's Morris, etc--are clearly in a different style than things with comparatively more complicated rulesets like Chess, Shogi, or even Go, much less the "modern" abstracts like those produced by nestorgames or in Project GIPF. They have a sort of banal simplicity and smallness that nevertheless leads to [often] interesting play value. Daniel's own board game designs seem to come down more aligned with this "folk game" trajectory than with the "serious" trajectory other abstract designers follow.

Finding / making games in the stupidest / simplest of places [QR codes] is something that appeals to me. I'm one who will sit and stare at a tiled floor attempting to discern a pattern in the color choices of the tiles, or trace / walk a particularly interesting path through the tiles. This is considerably more enjoyable when the pattern isn't symmetric. In redoing the flooring in our house recently, we were laying down laminate that came in about a half dozen different stickered "veneers". I made a game [which my in-laws made fun of] out of making sure there weren't discernible patterns on our floor.

Why you should be watching: I'm not entirely sure, honestly. His two biggest successes are RPGs, which I'll likely never play and know absolutely nothing about. More than anything, I think Daniel's approach to and thoughts on game design are compelling. His "big" card game under development, Belle of the Ball, looks vaguely interesting, but isn't really my style [from what I can tell].

But, I think we need more game designers willing to take the organic, human, asymmetric, serendipitous approach to game design that Daniel seems to be taking. Sometimes, the best art is found [see also], not made. The unexpected rhyme in a natural speech pattern. A pun you didn't intend. A shadow or cloud that takes a sudden unmistakable form. Surely there can be games made like this.

[This is where I really start to feel I'm running out of content I can speak knowledgeably on, but I'll just barrel through.] Richard is the designer of two of the most successful wargame-Eurogame hybrids in recent memory, Friedrich and Maria. His company, Histogame, is the publisher of record for both, as well as the extraordinarily difficult King of Siam from Peer Sylvester and the German co-publisher of the gargantuan Napoleon's Triumph from Bowen Simmons [whose company Simmons Games is another indie outfit of note, serving as the distributor state-side, as I understand it, of all of Histogame's titles in a sort of partnership].

Friedrich and Maria both use the same "tactic card" mechanism that Richard developed for Friedrich, the earlier of the two games. It bears a resemblance to the card mechanism in Condottiere and even to some extent the conflict resolution in Tigris & Euphrates. Each battle is fought in a particular "suit(s)" [yes, the traditional French ones] and players play cards from their hand in the matching suit looking to lay down the highest total whenever one or the other player drops out. The remainder of the game is a very elegant, nearly austere [only a few dozen "armies" are ever on the board], system of maneuver and positioning.

What makes Richard's designs compelling and interesting is the way he's managed to bring together three completely diverse influences: the random "make do" hand management aspect of traditional card games [the cards in Friedrich / Maria are simple poker decks], the elegant mechanistic positioning of early Eurogames [like Tigris, Torres, Carolus Magnus, or Kardinal & König], and the historic simulation value of grand scale wargames. Other games, like Twilight Struggle, have pulled off similar feats, but Friedrich / Maria are much more divergent from the typical design tropes of the genre. They are radically revisionist interpretations of what a "wargame" is.

It's also worth nothing that Richard has seemingly teamed up with another radical wargame designer in Bowen Simmons and his own company Simmons Games. Simmons' similarly highly maneuver-focused games Bonaparte at Marengo and Napoleon's Triumph are also similarly innovative in their radical departure from typical wargame design [both form and function]. I struggled through a game of NT once after borrowing it from a friend who wanted to learn to play; it is not the same kind of elegance as Friedrich / Maria, to be sure, but it was quite interesting to me how so many variables were handled without the need for a bunch of charts or unit statistics.

Why you should be watching: There will probably always be heavy-handed, rule-intensive wargames out there for the die-hard grognards. If you're like me, that doesn't appeal to you. It's just not my thing. What is my thing, however, is the positioning / maneuver / deployment-of-force decisions integral to wargaming. Richard's [and Bowen's, it seemed] games capture this without the high overhead.

I just picked up Friedrich, so haven't had a chance to play through it yet, but it's been recommended to me quite a number of times, and I see why after perusing the reviews and rulebook. It's a refreshingly different take on how to structure a game about war. It makes a huge number of abstractions, but that appeals to me as a card gamer and Euro-abstract / Knizia fan. Maybe it would appeal to you, too, if you like these genres.

[Dis]honorable mention: David Sirlin. Major designs: Yomi, Puzzle Strike, Flash Duel, and the company Sirlin Games. It's clear Sirlin has a unique vision. It doesn't really appeal to me, and I'm not knowledgeable enough to speak on it. I think it's interesting enough that you should read up on it. CS Hearns' recent blog entry on Sirlin should provide good reading material.

Hopefully this entry has introduced you to at least one new designer who I think is providing a fresh voice in the hobby.

More than anything, I hope it's convinced you that there is real diversity in the hobby if you bother to look outside "The Hotness".

Suddenly a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly a pirate ship appeared on the horizon! While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

In olden times, the animals of the forest could speak English just like you and me. One day, a pineapple challenged a hare to a race.

(I forgot to mention, fruits and vegetables were able to speak too.)

A hare is like a rabbit, only skinnier and faster. This particular hare was known to be the fastest animal in the forest.

“You, a pineapple have the nerve to challenge me, a hare, to a race,” the hare asked the pineapple. “This must be some sort of joke.”

“No,” said the pineapple. “I want to race you. Twenty-six miles, and may the best animal win."

"You aren't even an animal!" the hare said. “You're a tropical fruit!"

“Well, you know what I mean,” the pineapple said.

The animals of the forest thought it was very strange that a tropical fruit should want to race a very fast animal.

"The pineapple has some trick up its sleeve," a moose said.

"Pineapples don't have sleeves," an owl said

"Well, you know what I mean,” the moose said. "If a pineapple challenges a hare to a race, it must be that the pineapple knows some secret trick that will allow it to win.”

“The pineapple probably expects us to root for the hare and then look like fools when it loses,” said a crow. “Then the pineapple will win the race because the hare is overconfident and takes a nap, or gets lost, or something.”

The animals agreed that this made sense. There was no reason a pineapple should challenge a hare unless it had a clever plan of some sort. So the animals, wanting to back a winner, all cheered for the pineapple.

When the race began, the hare sprinted forward and was out of sight in less than a minute. The pineapple just sat there, never moving an inch.

The animals crowded around watching to see how the pineapple was going to cleverly beat the hare. Two hours later when the hare crossed the finish line, the pineapple was still sitting still and hadn't moved an inch.

The animals ate the pineapple.

MORAL: Pineapples don't have sleeves

Poll

1. Beginning with paragraph 4, in what order are the events in the story told?

Switching back and forth between places

In the order in which the events happen

Switching back and forth between the past and the present

In the order in which the hare tells the events to another animal

2. The animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were:

Hungry

Excited

Annoyed

Amused

3. Which animal spoke the wisest words?

The hare

The moose

The crow

The owl

4. Before the race, how did the animals feel toward the pineapple?

Suspicious

Kindly

Sympathetic

Envious

5. What would have happened if the animals had decided to cheer for the hare?

The pineapple would have won the race.

They would have been mad at the hare for winning.

The hare would have just sat there and not moved.

They would have been happy to have cheered for a winner.

6. When the moose said that the pineapple has some trick up its sleeve, he means that the pineapple:

Go ahead and try your hand at answering the questions; Ken Jennings has even weighed in! I don't know what the intended or actual right answers are, though I have a pretty good guess at what's intended.

I won't share my opinion on the intended answers until / unless we get some poll results.